I was thinking of building a heat exchange coil out of copper tubing to recirculate my mash through. Would copper be a poor choice to build a coil for this purpose mostly worried about off flavors since copper copper is a seeming practical choice for it malleability and heat exchange properties. The idea behind this is a a coil very similar to a immersion chiller except i would have a camlock/quick disconnect fitting on the "in" side and the outside will connect to a sparge arm into my mash tun. Overall the purpose is to be able to run through my whole brewing process with only one pump and not have to add any holes and permanent hardware in my HLT. The quick disconnect would allow me to recirculate/heat, then disconnect from the coil and sparge through the pump directly while gravity feeding the wort from my mash tun to the kettle. Sorry if the wording of this seems confusing I tried to keep the wording as direct as I could without drawing a pretty diagram, and by pretty I mean pretty ****ty.
HLT Heat Exchange
- Thread starter sksquibbs
- Start date
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Copper works fine for this application. I made mine out of an old stainless IM chiller I had. I made it permanent in my HLT. No difference in permanent or like you want to do. One thing I will tell you is that you need to stir the HLT water. When the water heats it will stratify and you need to stir it occasionally. I have a second pump that moves water from the bottom and whirlpools it at the top. A simple spoon or mash paddle can do the same.
I used 5/8" copper to make a coil and bought sharkbite fittings (1/2" fits the 5/8" copper) and attached my disconnects to it. I recirculate the entire mash and do step mashes using this. I have two pumps so I run my sparge water through the coli so that it both cleans it and I don't leave any wort behind. You could batch sparge off a single pump and not deal with gravity if you wanted.
