50' wort chiller? How to make it more efficient.

[Zrab11]

Alright so I have a 50' wort chiller I made last year.

I live in Indiana and the water temp is usually between 60-70 degrees. Today it is 37 degrees outside and the water temp is 60 degrees. I haven't brewed when the water Is at 60 yet but when we do brew at 65-70 degree water it takes my wort chiller a good 22-30 min to cool the wort down to 70 degrees. I have to stir the wort as well to help get it to temp.. I feel as this is not efficient enough and want to get it down to temp quicker as to not affect my beer.

My first thought on my wort chiller is that we didn't make it efficient enough.. The whole in the top of my keggle is 10 1/2 and keggle is about 14 wide and my wort chiller is only 7 1/2 inches in circumference so there is a lot of surface area/wort that the chiller is not touching.

So here are some ideas on how to improve my cooling process and I want to know what you think is the best use of my time and money.

1. Uncoil the wort chiller and expand it to 10 1/2 inches
2. Make a new wort chiller and Use the existing wort chiller I have now as a pre chiller(put it in a bucket or cooler and run the water through pre chiller and main chiller for 5 min then add ice to the pre chiller bucket)
3. Make a counter flow chiller - re use wort chiller I have now or sell it and by new copper to make counter flow
4. Use the chiller I have now but by a pump and re pump water I am using back through a cooler of ice and back though my wort chiller
5. Another option I haven't mentioned.

Copper is about 50$ for 50' where I live.

I am not made of money but want to have a good effective setup. Right now I am not concerned with conserving water as I do not pay the water bill where I brew but It might be a good idea for the future as I might only be brewing there the for another year. And its good for the environment to conserve water but it doesn't have to be a focal point.

I am doing 5 gallon extract brews right now and boiling 6 gallons of wort as I have a 15 gal keggle. I will be doing my first all grain batch next month though.

I don't want to spend a boat load of money and don't need to have the nicest setup. But i just want to have an efficient setup and do the most cost effective thing with the equipment I already have.

So please let me know what the best route for me to take would be! As I have heard good and bad things about pre chillers and counter flow chillers and the like and just want to get some advice on what would be the next best step for me in my situation.

 

[dyqik]

Recoiling the chiller won't increase the efficiency, unless significant parts of the chiller are already in contact with themselves. The surface area in contact with the wort will remain the same otherwise. Since you are stirring anyway, this won't change anything. If you weren't stirring, then recoiling would change the way convection stirred the wort for you, but making the coil larger might not improve things.

The only way to increase the speed of cooling is to a) stir harder (maybe whirlpool with a pump), b) precool the water to increase the temperature difference or c) switch to a counterflow arrangement that effectively keeps the wort flowing and increases the temperature difference.

All of these options except precooling with a second coil in an icebath requires a pump. The "little tan pump" is powerful enough to feed a CFC, but not powerful enough to whirlpool effectively. For a whirlpool, and generally for speed, you'll need a bigger pump.

 

[DrunkleJon]

I often stir with my IC. Seems to help a little (though be careful of the hot side). All in all thoughas long as the wort is moving over the coils you will get the same cooling.

 

[Indian_villager]

Stir with the IC in the kettle, recirculate Ice water through the coil instead of tap water, Use the tube to make a CFC.

You have options.

 

[durff]

I realize you may not have the money for it, but if you can sell your chiller take the money you would use for a pump and spend a little more you could get a plate chiller. Here is a link for some good priced plate chillers:
http://www.dudadiesel.com/search.php?query=+wort++chiller&i=beerchillers
That is the rout I would take, may not work for you. But it is another option.

 

[brewcephus]

I have a 25' chiller and a sump pump. The route I took is to fill an ice chest with ice and water. drop sump pump into ice chest and pump ICE cold water through the chiller. I've gotten my temps from boiling to 63* in roughly 15mins still had ice in the ice chest.

The return line is fed back into the ice chest so that you have a "closed" system so you just keep recirculating the ice cold water. Works pretty good in the hot and humid deep south.

 

[Huff360]

I'd use tap water to ~100 degrees, then switch to pumped ice water.

Grab a cheap pond pump from Harbor Freight (don't forget your 20% off coupon) and you will be set up for under $30 or so.

 

[horseinmay]

I have read that despite its simplicity, the whirlpool immersion chiller gives the best results. If you are serious about your brewing, you'll want a pump for all sorts of other reasons anyway, so get one. Recoil your chiller so that all of it sits under the fluid, and recirculate the wort in the kettle while it cools. That's probably going to be your best option since you already have the right chiller. You just need to use it optimally.

 

[jbaysurfer]

There's lots of good advice here (a pond pump in a bucket of ice water hooked to the IC is my method of speeding up/lager temp cooling) but honestly, 22-30 minutes is NOT a long time to cool. There's a thread about hopstands where commercial brewers are said to leave the wort at temps as high as 200F for as long as 90 minutes for a hopstand, so you're really in no danger at 30 minutes of cooling time. I can cool faster then that, but most of the time I choose not too...for various reasons.

 

[NickTheGreat]

I'm pretty sure Mr Bernouli says stirring with the chiller helps.

 

[Docbruw]

I cool with tap water down to around 90* and switch to a cooler/ice water setup to get down to pitching temp. Not that ice is expensive but I've started to fill 6-8 or more small food storage containers with water and freeze them the night before so I don't have to buy ice.

 

[brewcephus]

Not that ice is expensive but I've started to fill 6-8 or more small food storage containers with water and freeze them the night before so I don't have to buy ice.

my neighbor owns an ice house so ice is REALLY cheap for me and it's less than a mile from my house. Throw my ice chest in the back of the truck, ride up and fill it up, come home and brew.

 

[thadius856]

Meh. Water temps are 50-60F year-round here.

I put a barb to female garden hose on the output of my chiller. Connect the output to a lawn sprinkler. Let it run for 30 minutes or more while I clean and prep other things. Then just hit the override on my sprinkler system so it skips that nights' watering.

 

[kombat]

I made the leap to a plate chiller. I recirculate the wort back into the kettle. I run tap water through the chiller until the wort temperature drops below 100° F (takes about 5 minutes), then switch to pumping ice water from a camping cooler through the chiller to get me the rest of the way down into the low 60's (another 5-10 minutes). I've been extremely happy with this setup. It requires a bit of juggling to get everything set up properly and ready for the end of the boil, but it sure beats standing over my kettle, stirring wort for 30 minutes in a futile attempt to get it below 70°.

 

[NathPowe]

Do you have a chest freezer or something similar for fermentation temp control? If so, that can be a helpful tool in the chilling process. With a whirlpool immersion chiller setup, my tap/hose water drops my wort to about 85-90 fairly quickly. At that point I let it settle a bit, empty it to a fermenter, and then put it in the freezer. It's usually lost a few more degrees through those processes and the freezer drops it to pitching temps in a couple hours. Then I throw some yeast at it.

This works well for me and saves some time and water. I've done the ice water through the chiller with a pump thing and it was more hassle than I wanted. YMMV.

Have fun and enjoy the brew.

 

[LandoLincoln]

Yeah, your chilling times are not that bad. I have a 50' CF chiller and it takes me about about 15-20 minutes to cool off 10 gallons of wort.

I personally do not recommend plate chillers, as they were a royal pain to prevent clogging with hop debris.

 

[TheZer]

With water temp at 60*, your best bet might be to make a second IC with a 10" diameter, and throw them both in the pot. Since the smaller IC would fit inside the larger, you could lash them together with copper wire so its not awkward to deploy. Put a splitter on the end of your garden hose to feed both ICs.

 

[kombat]

I personally do not recommend plate chillers, as they were a royal pain to prevent clogging with hop debris.

*shrug* I've never had an issue.

I use a cylindrical hop screen in my boil kettle to contain my hops, and I have a HopStopper screen over the pickup tube on my outlet port to catch break material. The wort circulating through my chiller is very clear.

The only issue I've had is when I've added hops directly to the boil (instead of containing them in the hop screen), or with beers that had a lot of break material. In those cases, the HopStopper screen can get completely clogged, blocking the flow out the kettle's outlet port and causing the pump to lose prime. All I can do in that case is take a sanitized spoon and try to scrape some of the break material off the HopStopper screen to restore the higher flow rate.

 

[AnOldUR]

I use a cylindrical hop screen in my boil kettle to contain my hops . . .

A little off topic, but could you post a picture of your screen? I just ordered a custom screen from Jaybird. My idea seems similar to what you're using. I be interested to see what yours looks like and how well it works for you.

 

[william_shakes_beer]

I have a brew buddy that made a counterflow chiller. Was amazed at how much faster it was than my immersion chiller. (Uses a lot more water, however) As a starting point, I would recommend you place a couple coils of the inlet hose to your chiller into a bucket filled with ice to precool the supply water.

 

[kombat]

A little off topic, but could you post a picture of your screen?

Sure, no problem.

I've found it works great. The only issue I've had is with big batches of highly-hopped beer (10 gallon batch of IIPA). Sometimes the hop gunk can pool up inside the screen, above the water level, and I have to "punch" it back down (with my spoon) to ensure I'm getting full hop utilization. For regular size batches, however, they stay submerged.

 

[jbaysurfer]

I have a brew buddy that made a counterflow chiller. Was amazed at how much faster it was than my immersion chiller. (Uses a lot more water, however) As a starting point, I would recommend you place a couple coils of the inlet hose to your chiller into a bucket filled with ice to precool the supply water.

To each their own, but I tried this and it worked almost not at all. The hose is too thick and insulating to actually chill the water inside in the short time it flows through. A second copper coil in a bucket as a prechiller will work better, but what will work even better than that (and be cheaper if you don't have that second coil) is a $10-15 pond pump from Harbor Freight placed IN that bucket of ice water and recirculated through the existing IC.