Chilling with tubes and ice?

[pretzelb]

After the boil is complete, if you did a slow drain from the kettle via heat resistant tubing that wraps through a bucket of ice, would it end up cold enough for pitching? I know the tubing isn't as good as copper for heat dissipation but I thought if you drained slow enough so the wort had plenty of time to be exposed to cold water outside the tube it would eventually cool the contents inside the tube.

 

[WIP]

I was thinking the exact thing the other day, A bucket set up with tube in a spiral all the way through. Fill it with ice, water, and rock salt. The tube runs through a hole at the bottom of the bucket and is sealed so there is no water leaking. Set your pot on the counter, the bucket on a chair and the end of the tube in your primary. Precooling the wort in the sink is still a must, but if you can get it down to 130-150* the siphon could do the rest.


After thinking about it for about a week, I have decided it isn't the best idea though. You have to prechill it so it doesn't adversly effect the tubing, the setup would be hard to clean/sanitize, and the meterial cost would be only slightly lower than an imersion chiller. All to cut your chill time down to 15 minutes rather than the 20 that the ice bath alone would take.

If you want to speed up your cooling, get some rock salt and add that to your Ice/Water bath in your sink. Stir the water and wort to keep the process moving.

 

[BillyBroas]

Why not give it a shot? It sounds worthy of an experiment. Worst comes to worst it's not cool enough and you can just dump it back into the kettle (getting some nice aeration) and put it in an ice bath until it's ready. Let us know how it goes if you try it.

 

[maida7]

I'd be worried about cleaning the tubing.

Also plastic and pvc may not be good at high temps. Some plastics give off toxic chemicals when they are exposed to super hot temps.

Why not just use an immersion chiller? Too expensive? Not effective?

 

[Bobby_M]

Plastic tubing is so much more insulative than copper. Why not use copper? 25' of 3/8" OD copper is pretty cheap.

What you're suggesting is called a reverse immersion chiller. You'd need quite a bit of ice, then fill with water and you'd have to stir the mixture constantly as the wort moved through.

 

[Brewme]

I sugest the immersion chiller! You will be happy with thay decision later. The tubing idea would work like a simplified counterflow chiller. It would work, but isn't ideal. The toxic chemical comment is a good point too. You would need to use silicone tubing and at that cost, you might as well use an immersion chiller. Remeber, tubing goes bad too...copper will last forever!

 

[weirdboy]

I'd be worried about cleaning the tubing.

Really? Many people here use tubing to transfer from the MLT to the BK and from BK to CFC, plate chiller, or fermenter and it cleans up just fine.

Basically this sounds like a CFC, except there's no counterflow. So, the heat transfer will become less and less efficient as you continue to drain, unless you keep stirring the ice water.

 

[maida7]

Plastic tubing is so much more insulative than copper. Why not use copper? 25' of 3/8" OD copper is pretty cheap.

What you're suggesting is called a reverse immersion chiller. You'd need quite a bit of ice, then fill with water and you'd have to stir the mixture constantly as the wort moved through.

Now I would really worry about getting the insides of those copper tubes clean. At least with the plastic tubes you can see the insides.

You could boil the copper to sterilize it but who knows what kind of gunk would be left in there.

 

[weirdboy]

Now I would really worry about getting the insides of those copper tubes clean. At least with the plastic tubes you can see the insides.

You could boil the copper to sterilize it but who knows what kind of gunk would be left in there.

I swear it's like you've never heard of a CFC or plate chiller. If you flush/backflush it with a hot oxyclean solution it will be fine.

 

[gtpro]

isn't one reason for cooling the wort to establish the cold break, where undesirable proteins fall out of the wort onto the bottom of your kettle? Wouldnt this setup defeat that whole aspect of wort chilling, since those proteins are still in solution when you transfer to your fermentor?

 

[maida7]

Really? Many people here use tubing to transfer from the MLT to the BK and from BK to CFC, plate chiller, or fermenter and it cleans up just fine.

I guess your right. I was just imagining a looong spiral of tubing and thinking that may be hard to get clean. But if you can clean a short piece then why not a long one?

Plate chiller and CFC also freak me out as you can't see inside and they are probably harder to keep clean. I prefer the immersion chiller with a human powered, spoon driven whirlpool.

 

[BillyBroas]

If you're going to buy copper might as well do it in the form of an immersion chiller. On the other hand, if you are in the mad-scientist mood, go ahead and experiment like I originally suggested.

 

[pretzelb]

I suppose this is similar to a counter-flow chiller but without any chilling water movement around the inner pipe used in a counter-flow. Someone brought up a good point in that as time goes on the area around the tube will warm and the net effect will be less, which is probably why counter-flow chillers were created. I wonder if using an ice bath instead of regular ice would help since you can manually stir ice water to make sure the cooling effect is spread around.

I wondered about this for two reasons. First, I think an immersion chiller won't work so well in the heat of summer when the water coming out is going to be warmer. The solution to that of course is buying more hardware and get pre immersion chiller to cool the water out of the hose before it enters the chiller in the wort. Second, I was trying to conserve water as I just don't like seeing all that water going to waste. Sure I can capture and reuse some of it for cleaning but that's only going to be small portion of the total water used. If this idea would work then I'd be using just 1 bucket of water/ice to cool an entire batch.

As far as the comments on cleaning go, I would assume it's no different than any other tubing used in the beer making process. That goes for copper, plastic or otherwise.

As far as the chemical aspect goes, I would assume that any tubing rated as food safe and heat tolerant would be safe. Otherwise we (as home brewers) couldn't ever use anything made of plastic when it comes to hot liquids. Which would make all those valves on all those kettles seem really useless.

I'm thinking the heat retention of the plastic might be the biggest issue.

 

[maida7]

I swear it's like you've never heard of a CFC or plate chiller. If you flush/backflush it with a hot oxyclean solution it will be fine.

I've heard of them and I have some friends that use the plate chillers so they must work. Also I imagine a real brewery must use something similar. Isn't a heat exchanger like a giant plate chiller?

Can you take it apart every so often to see whats inside and do a more thorough cleaning?

 

[maida7]

I wondered about this for two reasons. First, I think an immersion chiller won't work so well in the heat of summer when the water coming out is going to be warmer. The solution to that of course is buying more hardware and get pre immersion chiller to cool the water out of the hose before it enters the chiller in the wort. Second, I was trying to conserve water as I just don't like seeing all that water going to waste. Sure I can capture and reuse some of it for cleaning but that's only going to be small portion of the total water used. If this idea would work then I'd be using just 1 bucket of water/ice to cool an entire batch.

How well you immersion chiller works is definitely effected by the temp of the water. In summer they don't work as well and they really start to suck for people in very hot climates.

I've tried the prechiller and it did not work all that great.

I haven't tried this but I think is you filled a bucket with ice water and pumped (with a cheap fountain pump) the ice water thru the immersion chiller. This may allow you too cool wort way below your tap water temps. I would use the tap water to get it below 100F then move to the pump with the ice water bucket. And recirculate the ice water back to the bucket.

OR

Just use the immersion chiller to get it cool like 80F or whatever is practical then move the wort to the fermenter and wait for it to cool on it's own. If you have a spare fridge you could stick the fermenter in the fridge to speed things up. But keep an eye on it or it may end up too cold.

 

[greeneyed]

I have a tote big enough for the keggle.
Fill it with ice water.
Have immersion chiller hooked to an aquarium pump(cheap and submersible).
Put pump in tote.
I can get from boil to pitching temp in <10 minutes.
Also Have a lot of cold break in keggle when done. Alot more so than with just the water hose hooked to chiller.
Easy and cheap enough. Of course, I already had the aquarium pump. But they are not too expensive.

 

[weirdboy]

I've heard of them and I have some friends that use the plate chillers so they must work. Also I imagine a real brewery must use something similar. Isn't a heat exchanger like a giant plate chiller?

Can you take it apart every so often to see whats inside and do a more thorough cleaning?

There's no taking apart any plate chillers I've seen on the homebrew scale. On the other hand if you're really worried about it being gunked up inside, you can just stick it in your oven in self-cleaning mode and bake anything in there to ash, then flush it out.

 

[The Pol]

Guys, hate to say it, this has already been done...

All of the calculations to determine ice qty. are in the second link

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/closed-system-wort-cooling-works-140496/

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/therminator-ice-water-whirlpool-question-140003/

Photo of the setup:

 

[pretzelb]

I have a tote big enough for the keggle.
Fill it with ice water.
Have immersion chiller hooked to an aquarium pump(cheap and submersible).
Put pump in tote.
I can get from boil to pitching temp in <10 minutes.
Also Have a lot of cold break in keggle when done. Alot more so than with just the water hose hooked to chiller.
Easy and cheap enough. Of course, I already had the aquarium pump. But they are not too expensive.

Hey, now that's a neat idea!

Did you have to make a special hose attachment to hook the pump to the chiller? It's been a while since I looked at aquarium pumps but chillers come with the garden hose connectors and I think pumps are much smaller diameter.

I really like that idea. The water is a finite amount. The wort is cooled from outside and inside at the same time too.

Only issue is you need a tub of some sort that can handle the kettle and ice. I hate uni-task tools so I might have to get creative on that one.

 

[pretzelb]

Guys, hate to say it, this has already been done...

All of the calculations to determine ice qty. are in the second link

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/closed-system-wort-cooling-works-140496/

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/therminator-ice-water-whirlpool-question-140003/

Photo of the setup:

Well, I wasn't thinking of using a copper coil or a pump. What I am starting to think is that without at least the copper coil it won't work.

 

[The Pol]

Well, I wasn't thinking of using a copper coil or a pump. What I am starting to think is that without at least the copper coil it won't work.

You need something that will REALLY transfer heat if you want to do it in one pass.

Also, it takes 25 minutes to reach pitching temps with the recirc. that I do. This means that in theory you would have to drain at a rate of 1 gallon every 5 minutes. You will also need agitation around the tube carrying the wort, otherwise the eff. of the system will be horrible.

This being said, it takes about 44 pounds of ice and 3 gallons of water to cool 5.5 gallons in my system.

What you want to do is move energy... and to move this much energy you need to conduct it well. Plastics will not do, copper or SS will. You also have to be aware of the copious number of heat calories that you are trying to remove from your wort... this takes an equally copious amount of ice.

Keep in mind ice water is NOT the same as ICE. Ice requires so many calories just to heat it to 32F to begin the melting process that it carries much more cooling power than "ice water". This is why I start with JUST enough water to immerse my coil. Water cannot absorb many heat calories/g, BUT ice can absorb many heat calories/g. I mean, I can chill to 57F with 44 pounds of ice, that is 44 pounds of water, that is less than 6 gallons of water! The fact that it is in a frozen state is what makes it work.

Also in your case with the single pass idea, you want to melt the ice as fast as you can, the faster the wort melts the ice, obviously the faster the cooling.

 

[greeneyed]

Pump had 1/2" threads, so was easy yo get a barb fitting to attach hose to.
Tote? Not one dimensional. It hold alot of brewing day supplies when they aren't in use.

 

[The Pol]

I just use my HLT