Anyone use a water chiller before a wort chiller?

What I mean is do any of you use a chiller in an ice batch in between your spigot and your wort chiller to really cool down the ground water? As the summer heat starts to beat down, cooling the wort is getting harder and harder.

I spent 20 mins on my last batch just getting the wort below 80F and had to wait another several hours in my fermentation chamber to get it to pitching temp.

I'm considering building a very small chiller to go in an ice bath to rapidly cool the ground water temp down in route to the wort chiller in hopes that I can speed the process up and not waste so much damn h20 and time!

 

I'm interested as well. I tried a submersible pump in a cooler with frozen gallon jugs of water (to create an "ice bath"). It didn't work well at all. The hot water being returned to the cooler over powered the frozen jugs ability to keep the water cool. Within ten minutes the water was hot to the touch.

 

I do. My water is at least 80* in the summer, higher if the hose is running across the lawn in the hot sun.

I fill a cooler with ice and set a 25' 3/8" chiller in the cooler and run a short hose to my 50' 3/8" IC in my wort. To cool quickly I have to keep both chillers moving in their respective liquids, but I get down to 65 in about 12 minutes and use less than 20 gallons of water.

 

I use a Hayden 457 oil cooler as my pre-chiller for my Alabama (so-called) cooling water. It wasn't really necessary when the tap water was in the 60's, now it's in the mid-70's and forget trying to get the wort cooled using unchilled tap water.

But it's still not enough so I need to go from pre-chilling tap water to a recirculating the chill water itself using a cheapo HF pond pump. I'll get that before my next brew in the next week or so.

Pics:

 

Yep, every time. Spigot to 25' chiller submersed in ice/water to 50' chiller in wort. Chills 12 gals to about 65F in about 45 mins... I also use Jamil's recirculation setup.

 

With summer coming you may have to. I don't understand how people can cool to 70F with 76F water, but you'll find people on the boards who achieve the impossibility, and do it within 30 minutes to complete their 3 hours, AG brew day.

 

I need a pre-chiller. With our tap water, I can get the wort to about 80 degrees, but I have to put it in my kegerator to get it down to pitching temps.

 

i feed my wort chiller from my bottling bucket, which I fill with ice

 

I use an IC and submersible pump/ice water recirc. My summertime city water temps average around 76˚F. It takes about 10 minutes to get my wort down from boiling to ~100˚F with this water directly into the IC due to the large temperature differential between boiling wort and even relatively high temp tap water. At that point the temperature differential is not great enough for chilling any further in a reasonable amount of time.

Now the objective is to create another large temperature differential. Disconnect the city water from the IC and go into ice water recirc mode with the submersible pump in a 5 gallon bucket filled with tap water and store bought crushed ice. The pump discharges the ice water into the IC and the return water goes back into the ice water bucket. This an efficient use of the ice, as the return water temp is no so high as to obliterate the ice as it recirculates. I use about two 5lb bags of ice, topped off with city water. I'm able to go the rest of the way from ~100˚F to lager pitching temps (~55˚F) if I want in about another 5-7 minutes with this method.

If you're cooling an ale, it's very easy to over cool using this method, so watch your temps closely.

 

I could only find 20' or 50' copper tubing and the 50' cost more that what the 10' extra would be so I made two 20' coil immersion chillers. One is smaller so it would fit inside the first, or as I usually do one goes in a bucket of ice water and the other into the wort. It still usually takes close to 1/2 hour.

I haven't figured out how people get their wort cooled in 10 minutes with an immersion chiller???

 

I thought of doing that, but the pre-chiller in a cooler full of ice water (I get 20lbs of ice for $1.50) gets me the same results and I don't need a pump or have to change my hoses around.

Seems simpler to me, but in the end we get the same results

 

I recently bought a Therminator and now use my chiller in a bucket of ice water as a pre-chiller. Makes for WICKED fast cooling to pitching temps, directly into my carboy. :rockin:

 

Instead of running your cooling water through an ice bath, why not just let the hot wort flow through the ice bath? I would think the wort would chill even faster running through the copper tubing, submerged in icy water. You could go from the ice bath straight into the fermenter.

Just an idea.

 

Looks like this thread got awoken from the dead!


Not that this method of temperature transfer wouldn't be effective, but this discussion was centered around immersion chillers. Moving the wort isn't uncommon (counterflow chillers, plate chillers), but presents a different scenario that people electing to go with ICs choose to avoid - ie, ease of cleanliness, sanitation, potentially pumping wort with hop/break matter that could clog pumps, having to keep the pump clean, etc.

 

Another idea: instead of using a garden hose, hook the chiller up to a bottling bucket/mash tun and dump ice in with the water that's running through the chiller. This way you don't have to make another chiller or anything.

 

Fair enough. I just saw that some people were concerned about wasting water and thought this could be a way to do so. I guess it's just a trade off that depends on what's more of a priority to you.

I don't want to waste a ton of water and don't see how running sanitizer and then wort thru the IC is any more difficult than sanitizing the exterior of an IC.

To each their own. Do whatever works for you.

 

I use two chillers and an ice bath. I have a chill-zilla (counter-flow) chiller for the first stage using ground water. I then run from there into a plate chiller submerged in a large cooler filled with ice water and a medium sized pond pump to circulate the ice water through the plate-chiller. The wort then goes through a inline thermometer and into the fermenters. This setup works great even in a hot Texas summer. 11 bags of ice will chill 45 gals of lager wort to 48-50 degrees F. Hope this helps.