Glycol replace the wort chilling plate?

[kohalajohn]

Hello all. New member here. After many years I am coming back to home brewing.

I am considering going all out and getting a Clawhammer biab and a BrewBuilt X3 fermenter conical with a glycol system.

Does this mean I can dispense with the Clawhammer chilling plate? I mean, can I just pump the boiling hot wort into the BrewBuilt fermenter and use the glycol system to cool it down to pitching temperatures?

Thank in advance.

 

[Whisky River]

I think people generally don't recommend using the glycol chiller to chill the wort all the way down from boiling because that places a large thermal load on the chiller which could lead to it’s failure or wear it out faster. I’m not exactly sure how much of a toll it would take and if you oversized your glycol chiller by enough it might work but the water based chilling systems are cheap and I think most people would rather use them and stress their expensive components less. YMMV though.

Also, welcome!

 

[Broken Crow]

That's a lot of cash outlay.... Have you taken a look at the brewhardware BIABs?
https://www.brewhardware.com/product_p/biabpackagepremium.htm
https://www.brewhardware.com/product_p/biabpackageblichmannbd.htm
https://www.brewhardware.com/product_p/biabpackagetank.htm
There are a number of refinements, not the least of which is the innovative split recirculation that provides more uniform temperatures in the mash. ....Here's a thread by the builder:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/thread...ly-is-mythbusting-for-traditionalists.686973/
Well worth the read to get a handle on the most recent developments in this area of brewing...BTW: Welcome back to the fun!
I'm personally more a fan of counterflow chillers, but hey: If you don't mind cleaning them, plate chillers are by far the most efficient.
I understand the excitment of a return to brewing, but do yourself a big favour and read and collect a lot of feedback before you part with your cash.....after all, you're currently looking at a base system to just begin getting back in the game...try and save some money because there are so many other useful things that many of us on here will suggest you buy between commencing your first brewday and drinking the product.

 

[kohalajohn]

Thanks for all the quick responses

 

[Bobby_M]

Glycol systems are not build to have 200+ degree coolant returning back to the compressor which is what would happen pretty quickly. 80F tap water cools 200F wort pretty fast. Let the glycol take it from 100F down to pitching temps.

 

[kohalajohn]

I received a quick email response from Dave Salter at MoreFlavour and then when I left a message I received a very quick and helpful phone call.

In short, they say that although a glycol system could handle it, I would be asking the AC unit to do much more than it was designed for. I would be prematurely wearing out an expensive system.

Best to use the Clawhammer chill plate first. The chill plate is built for handling boiling hot liquid. The glycol is not.. The Glycol is for maintaining a cool temperature. And at the end, doing a cold crash is not a strain on the glycol. By then the fermenter tank is pressurized with CO2 so no vacuum problems.

His email is below:




Hello,

It is possible but I wouldn't recommend it. When cooling the tank down with that great of a temperature difference, you will create a vacuum inside of the tank unless you keep a port open. Creating a vacuum in the tank could damage it as it is rated for positive pressure and not negative. Leaving a port open for the amount of time it will take to cool the wort to a safe yeast pitching temperature will create a high possibility of pulling in contaminates that could spoil the beer. Please let me know if you have any additional questions and I'll be happy to help!
Cheers!

Dave Salter
Customer Service Representative | MoreFlavor! Inc.
Office Hours - Monday - Wednesday, 8am - 5pm PST
Please call 1-800-600-0033 for immediate assistance

 

[IslandLizard]

Best to use the Clawhammer chill plate first. The chill plate is built for handling boiling hot liquid.

Homebrew size "chill plates" (or more accurately: "plate chillers") require the wort to be free of pulp before it enters the chiller, or they will get clogged up.
IOW, you'll need to filter the (coarse) hop pulp and any other pulp out before the wort enters the plate chiller.

Using a hop basket, hop bag, or some other fairly fine mesh filter (e.g. a "Hop Stopper" type) of the right size, placed in the kettle will prevent (coarse) hop pulp, fruit pulp, Irish Moss fining material, etc. from entering the plate chiller.
There are a few other methods to prevent that from happening.

A counterflow chiller may well be a better, easier alternative to chill your wort. There are other options too.

 

[Skeeter686]

I watched an interview with the two guys who won 2024 homebrewer of the year, and I'm pretty sure they dump the hot wort into the fermenter without chilling. However, I believe they said that they let it naturally cool to a reasonable temperature before actively controlling the temperature and pitching yeast. The hot wort basically heat pasteurizes the fermenter.

It sounded interesting, but I expect you need to live with certain constraints, like: your flameout hops are probably contributing a lot more bitterness, you can't do whirlpool additions of anything, etc.

 

[day_trippr]

Look up "no chill brewing" if you want to learn more about ^that^...

Cheers!

 

[kohalajohn]

Skeeter's point about transferring hot wort into the fermenter and waiting, that's interesting. In the old days that was a terrible idea, but in the old days we didn't have good sanitizers and hermetically sealed lids.

 

[kohalajohn]

The idea I'm wrestling with, is avoiding contact between wort and chiller. The coil means cleaning issues. The chill plate means clogging issues. The counterflow chiller is better, but you still have to clean and sanitize.

The gylcol jacket is a brilliant solution. Please excuse my newbie excitement but I"m just coming back to homebrewing after decades away, and I'm just stunned with the new tech available.

Anyway. I get that you can't run boiling temperatures through a glycol chiller. But there are fixes for this.

As Skeeter said, letting the hot wort cool in a sterile and sealed fermenter, works. The folk who won those awards were confident enough about this method, that they used it in a competition. And won.

 

[kohalajohn]

I read about the "no chill". Interesting.

I suppose the downside to a slow cool, even if you avoid infection, is that you keep "cooking" the hop oils for many more hours. That could affect the recipe.

An idea for a quick chill without damaging the glycol AC machine, may be to place a keg of cold water between the glycol exit tube and the glycol pond.

The glycol in the exit tube would exit the fermenter overly hot, but as it then ran through a cold water bath, that would drop the temperature. And from there, a reasonable temperature would enter the glycol AC machine.

You are replacing the chill plate with a keg of cold water. You retain the advantage of the bare wort never running through chillers.

 

[kohalajohn]

Has anyone tried moving the chill plate away from the boiler and instead, to the entrance to the glycol AC machine?

"Adding boiling wort to the fermenter would certainly result in excessively hot glycol entering the AC machine.

But if the hot glycol ran through a chill plate, it would enter the AC machine at a reasonable temperature.

The point is to get rid of the clogging and infection problems that arise when you have bare wort contact chilling systems.

Chill the glycol, not the wort.

 

[kohalajohn]

Ok, another idea. I'm looking to get the IceMaster Max 2.

While it has two separate systems in it, to service two fermenters, I only plan to use one fermenter at a time.

So how about hooking up the two systems to run together, in series?

Yes, the entering glycol would be very hot, but it would run through a double length of tubing, through double the amount of liquid in the cooling pond and there would be two compressors working away to keep the cooling pond cold.

 

[Whisky River]

If you are just looking to use the fermenter jacket for cooling that should be possible, assuming your fermenter can withstand having the boiling liquid in it for a while. Just run cold tap water through the jacket until temps come down a bit and then switch over to using the chiller.

 

[Broken Crow]

Many have tried to reinvent that wheel, only to learn they'd wasted a lot of time, effort and cash when the simple popular ways endure for a good reason. I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned the most common chiller the majority of homebrewers find perfectly adequate: A simple Immersion Chiller. The only reason I don't use one anymore is because I'm disabled and have to reduce shoulder use. Here's the gold standard of IC'c: https://jadedbrewing.com/

 

[WesBrew]

BC beat me to it. It's the simplest way to chill wort relatively fast, if you have cold tap water. Don't use glycol to chill the wort fast from near boiling. I run mine through a plate chiller then into the fermenter and collect the tap water in a bucket. I use the glycol chiller to get to pitching temp from about 80f. After, I dump the collected tap water in the boiler, heat up and pump through the plate chiller to clean everything out.

 

[kohalajohn]

If you are just looking to use the fermenter jacket for cooling that should be possible, assuming your fermenter can withstand having the boiling liquid in it for a while. Just run cold tap water through the jacket until temps come down a bit and then switch over to using the chiller.

Oh, well that's an elegant solution. May take longer than a traditional chiller. Might not matter.

 

[Whisky River]

if you’re thinking about chilling in your fermenter just make sure you DO NOT seal the fermenter before you start chilling. You can get a pretty spectacular implosion if you seal the lid first.

 

[kohalajohn]

if you’re thinking about chilling in your fermenter just make sure you DO NOT seal the fermenter before you start chilling. You can get a pretty spectacular implosion if you seal the lid first.

Yeah, that's what customer service said too.
The problem with not sealing the fermenter is that you're drawing in outside bacteria as the volume shrinks.

I could put a tank of co2 on it and have slightly positive pressure. But this is becoming a bit complicated, and I was trying to simplify things.

Just using the chill plate may still be the best. I like WesBrew's point about reusing the warmed water for washing up after.

 

[Whisky River]

It’s possible to overthink all of this stuff. I think most people just put a cloth soaked in Starsan over one of the small ports and call it good. Unless you introduce a ton of bacteria the yeast are going to do a pretty good job of outcompeting them.

 

[IslandLizard]

Just using the chill plate may still be the best.

That's what I've been doing, using a 30-plate chiller, similar to the one that's shown on the Clawhammer site.*

I first recirculate the wort (back to the kettle) using regular tap water ~50-65°F depending on season.
Once the wort in the kettle has dropped to around 130-140°F I switch to pre-chilled water (around 32-40°F) in a single pass to the fermenter.

The past 10 years I've been brewing mostly 5 gallon batches, for the simple reason to have more variety of beer on hand.
I typically brew 2 (different) batches, back to back, so there's only one setup and one cleanup.

That plate chiller works fine for 10 gallon batches. It just takes 2x as long, literally.
If you plan on actually doing 10 gallon or larger batches a larger plate chiller would be advantageous. Or use 2 in series which may be even better than a single one.

* However, Dudadiesel has a large variety of plate chillers available, and their pricing has always been better than elsewhere, so I would check them out first.
http://dudadiesel.com/heat_exchangers.php

BTW, it's not a chill plate, it is called a plate chiller.

 

[kohalajohn]

Nice link to the chillers, Island.

The site has fascinating stuff about efficiency and flow rates. And like you implied, two of the thirty plate chillers would be more efficient than one sixty plate chiller.

 

[Bobby_M]

So how about hooking up the two systems to run together, in series?

No, the two systems are pumping the same glycol from the same 4.5 gallon tank.

Many have tried to reinvent that wheel, only to learn they'd wasted a lot of time, effort and cash when the simple popular ways endure for a good reason. I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned the most common chiller the majority of homebrewers find perfectly adequate: A simple Immersion Chiller. The only reason I don't use one anymore is because I'm disabled and have to reduce shoulder use. Here's the gold standard of IC'c: https://jadedbrewing.com/

Agree. No reason you can't drop that into the fermenter either

If you are just looking to use the fermenter jacket for cooling that should be possible, assuming your fermenter can withstand having the boiling liquid in it for a while. Just run cold tap water through the jacket until temps come down a bit and then switch over to using the chiller.

There are a couple of challenges to this solution but it's how the BrewHa BIAC system worked. First, you do want to drain the glycol out to not keep mixing/diluting it with cold tap water. Then when you switch to glycol, same deal. Lastly, it's a pretty low surface area so it will use more water than an immersion chiller.

Has anyone tried moving the chill plate away from the boiler and instead, to the entrance to the glycol AC machine?

"Adding boiling wort to the fermenter would certainly result in excessively hot glycol entering the AC machine.

But if the hot glycol ran through a chill plate, it would enter the AC machine at a reasonable temperature.

The point is to get rid of the clogging and infection problems that arise when you have bare wort contact chilling systems.

Chill the glycol, not the wort.

This actually isn't a bad idea. If you want to try it, run the output of the conical glycol port to a 3-way valve so that you can either run it through the chiller or not so that when you're doing the "big job" of cooling the boiling wort down the glycol has to go through the heat exchanger but when you're just in maintain mode the glycol doesn't have to keep going through that big heat sink.

 

[kohalajohn]

Wow. This is the most helpful and informative forum. Seriously.

And Bobby, good tip about the three way valve. That's the way to do it.

 

[ClaudiusB]

I read about the "no chill". Interesting.

I suppose the downside to a slow cool, even if you avoid infection, is that you keep "cooking" the hop oils for many more hours. That could affect the recipe.

An idea for a quick chill without damaging the glycol AC machine, may be to place a keg of cold water between the glycol exit tube and the glycol pond.

The glycol in the exit tube would exit the fermenter overly hot, but as it then ran through a cold water bath, that would drop the temperature. And from there, a reasonable temperature would enter the glycol AC machine.

You are replacing the chill plate with a keg of cold water. You retain the advantage of the bare wort never running through chillers.

I use a simple setup for cooling the wort. City water cools the wort from the whirlpool tank through the pre-chiller, then the pre-cooled wort enters the glycol chiller. The chiller is equipped with a 30-gallon reservoir and cools the wort below lager pitching temperatures.

 

[shoengine]

Chilling coils are trivially easy to clean. Divert the hottest discharge from the coil to a bucket filled with your favorite cleaning solution and dunk the coil as soon as it is done chilling. 90 seconds to clean, tops.

Get a bunch of junk in the plate chiller? Much longer cleaning process.

 

[Bobby_M]

Get a bunch of junk in the plate chiller? Much longer cleaning process.

Plate exchangers are so good at what they do but the speed and cooling efficiency is offset by hassle of keeping it from clogging and cleaning it afterwards. This struggle between the pros and cons really depends on batch size. For a 5 gallon batch, almost any chilling solution works fine including immersion chillers which are the easiest to clean. Once you get to 10 gallon batches, it starts to become a judgement call. Above that size, plate or high end tube in tube CFC chillers start winning.