Cooling my brew

[cvav8or]

Hello all, I finally took the plunge and purchased my homebrew supplies in the form of a pretty complete kit from my local homebrew supply store. I was going to brew my first batch tonight but stopped as I realized I have no way to "cool" my batch down to the required 65-75 degrees before pitching the yeast. I was told I should cool it as quickly as possible but how the heck do I do this? I was contemplating making a large coil out of copper tubing which I would submerge into my brew after cooking it and would run water through it from my sink faucet therby allowing me to control the flow and temp. Is this idea crazy? and if anyone has any better ideas please let me know if I'm about to make a disasturous mistake. Also any pictures of your cooling method would be very appreciated. thanks.

cvav8or

 

[Jekster]

What you're planning on making is called an "Immersion wort chiller" do a search on this board or any home brew store and you'll see what they look like.

This is a fantastic way to cool wort and is used successfully by many people. One thing to think about though is having the right fitting for making your faucet convert to a garden hose or whatever adapter you're going to use on the chiller. You can usually get those though at Lowes or any LHBS.

Also, if you just want to get some brews under your belt some people do water / ice bathes. It's not the most efficient but it'll get the job done eventually. Just sit your kettle down in it, stir, and add ice as needed.

 

[Danek]

Sounds like a great idea. Check out

http://www.howtobrew.com/appendices/appendixC.html

for further thoughts along those lines.

As I understand it, chillers are particularly important for large volume boils, such as those you'd do for all-grain brewing. My brews so far have used extract, so I've boiled two or three gallons of wort, cooled it in an ice bath in my kitchen sink (to around 120F), and then topped off to five gallons with chilled distilled water (around 35F). The ice bath and the cooled top-off water gets the wort down to around 75F in maybe 25 minutes, which is close to ideal for the yeast I've used. I'm guessing your kit will use liquid malt extract or dried malt extract, so you could use a similar method to me.