Heat Pasteurizing Juice Then Cooling it for Plastic Jugs

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MtnGoatJoe

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Along with making cider, I like to give away some of the non-fermented apple juice. And I prefer to heat pasteurize the juice by heating it to 160F for 10 minutes. I use a large double-boiler because it heats the juice quickly without boiling it.

The problem is that I don’t want to give away my expensive glass jugs and would prefer to use 1-gallon milk jugs. Unfortunately, plastic milk jugs have a maximum fill temperature of around 171F. This is too close to the 160F of my juice as I want to be sure that no chemicals are leaching out of the jug.

So, I needed a way to cool the juice down without waiting for it to cool naturally (because I pasteurize three gallons at a time, and it takes FOREVER for it to cool down naturally.

I could have bought an immersion chiller at my LHBS, but it requires a water source to run through it, and that would be inconvenient.

I noodled on it for a while and came up with basically the reverse process. I bought a 25 foot silicon tube ($22) to connect to my syphone and I’m running most of the tubing through a 5-gallon bucket of ice water.

Using the half-bag of ice I had in my freezer, and testing with water, I was able to get the temp from 163 F to 119 F. This is sufficient, but I'll use more ice next time to see if I can cool the juice more a bit more.

On a side note, I also bought a silicone air fryer liner (see the picture; $15 for two), drilled a small hole in it, and stuck my Meater+ thermometer through it so I can remotely monitor the temp of the juice. The silicone liner keeps the probe floating in the middle of the pot and doesn’t let the top end get submerged (wet is fine, but submerged is bad).

Anyway, I doubt anyone will find this useful, but I thought I’d throw it out there just in case. Any thoughts?

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