Using a fridge to cool wort

[Bassman2003]

I am with Lizard here. For ales, I have found great success with storing cold water in my lager fridge to use on brewday. I have three 3 gallon tubs that I keep filled with water. I then put the water from chilling right back into them and they go back in the fridge. So a little bit of conservation going on.

For lagers I use whatever it takes to get down to 80F ish then put ice cubes in my reservoir and recirculate the water back out from the chiller into the reservoir. The key is to only have enough water in the reservoir to keep the loop going. You want the cubes to melt because the melting water is the coldest. If you have too much other water in there the melting water temp is wasted on the water, not the wort. So you have to have a glass or container to catch and remove the return water to keep the level low.

I have lowered a lager wort to 44F in my garage on a 100F day using this method. It works!

 

[IslandLizard]

For lagers I use whatever it takes to get down to 80F ish then put ice cubes in my reservoir and recirculate the water back out from the chiller into the reservoir.

Depending on your chiller performance, keep an eye on the temps of the chiller output. Especially in the beginning when the wort is still quite warm, you don't want to "pollute" your chilling reservoir with warm water, losing its effectiveness.

I throttle the flow down to have "optimal" heat exchange, and recapture the warm effluent. It let it chill (outdoors) and either reuse for the next batch (after rechilling), or use for cleaning, watering plants, etc.

BTW, I use a plate chiller.
I've been thinking about getting a 2nd for the final chilling stage, to bring the wort down from 100-120°F down to pitching temps, in a single pass to the fermenter.
I don't do many Lagers.

 

[Bassman2003]

Yes, great point. Chilling has been quite a journey for me over the years. I enjoy the engineering aspect of building the best mousetrap I can think up!

My current routine is hose water first. I pour the first 8-9 gallons of hot output water into my HLT for PBW water. I then switch to recirculating the hose water for a bit. Depending on the time of year and style of beer, I will introduce the chilled water into the reservoir (I put the chiller water into my Anvil Foundry which is my mash tun) and recirc it. I then go to ice if needed. My chiller is a NY Homebrew 50ft 1/2" ID SS immersion chiller with the Anvil Foundry chiller hooked up inside as well. So two chillers tied together in one. More surface area.

 

[worlddivides]

Thanks to the ridiculous amounts of ice, I was able to get the wort down from boiling (212F/100C) to 167F/75C in about 5 minutes, then down to 122F/50C in about 20 minutes, then down to 95F/35C in about 40 minutes, then down to 77F/25C in about 60 minutes. All in all, it took me a little over 1 hour to go from 212F/100C to 77F/25C. I pitched the yeast at 75F/24C and managed to get the wort in the fermenter down to 16-17C / 60-63F in about 6-7 hours after that. As is typical of US-05, no airlock activity yet, and hell, knowing this strain, I might not have any activity when I wake up tomorrow either. I slightly surpassed my estimated starting gravity, even though the wort sample tasted WAY less bitter than I expected for all the Centennial and Idaho 7 I boiled, but it's probably just the sweetness of the malt covering up the bitterness (hopefully at least). I mashed at 65.5C / 150F for 1 hour, so I expect a relatively crisp, dry end result. The lactic acid and gypsum additions should also help emphasize those hops.

In the end, I got the wort in the kettle down to 77F/25C, despite it being 96F outside and pretty hot in my kitchen too, so I didn't even entertain the idea of sticking the fermenter in the fridge after all.

 

[T Murph]

It is an evolving practice we all experience learning as we go in this hobby. I have been homebrewing 30+ years and along the way I have employed many different ways to cool wort. I have utilized immersion chillers and plate chillers. In my opinion both do a decent job getting your wort down to pitching temperatures. However, either method can be substancially improved by utilizing an ice and water vessel with a pump to push ice cold water through the chiller instead of relying on water from the faucet. I use a 20 gal ss vessel with a small pond pump connected to an immersion chiller. I have a dedicated double door fridge for my brewery where I freeze 5 small hotel/steam table pans of water. Additionally days before brew day i remove the blocks of ice store them in the freezer and refill the pans to make more ice. The pans make blocks of ice approximately 6 inch cubes. When it is time to chill my wort i put about 4 gallons of cold water and 2 blocks of ice in the pot. I then turn the pump on and the cooling begins. I generally takes about 20 minutes to get down to 60 degrees for lagers and only about 15 minutes to get down to 68 for ales.

At the beginning the water coming out of the ic is boiling hot. So I pump that hot water into a bucket for clean up. I usually end up with at least 4 gallons of hot water. Cold water and additional ice blocks are added as needed. By this time the quick chill slows considerably as the temperature of the wort is around 100 degrees. As the wort temp reduces the chill slows also. Now I let the runoff feed back into the ice water pot to finish chilling. This allows me to chill my wort without wasting a bunch of water unnecessarily.

 

[hotbeer]

Thanks to the ridiculous amounts of ice, I was able to get the wort down from boiling (212F/100C) to 167F/75C in about 5 minutes, then down to 122F/50C in about 20 minutes, then down to 95F/35C in about 40 minutes, then down to 77F/25C in about 60 minutes. All in all, it took me a little over 1 hour to go from 212F/100C to 77F/25C. I pitched

What method did you use? And how much wort?

1 hour seems a tad long. And ridiculous amounts of ice unnecessary.

 

[worlddivides]

What method did you use? And how much wort?

1 hour seems a tad long. And ridiculous amounts of ice unnecessary.

Like I said, just an ice bath. It was a little over 4 gallons of wort.

I don't have a wort chiller anymore and I'm not even sure if it'd be possible to attach it to my sink at the place I just moved to since the kitchen sink's faucet is completely flat with no visible place to screw in an attachment (I did look into sprinkler adapters, since those often work well with sink faucets for enabling you to attach a wort chiller, but all the ones I saw screwed into something), so I don't see how I'd be able to attach it. Also, while in most places I've lived before the sink and the stove have been right next to each other, in this house, there's a decent amount of space between the stove and the sink.

The last time I tried an ice bath was maybe 10 years ago and it did not go very well, taking an absurd amount of time to get down to a reasonable temperature, whereas this time I was able to get it to the limit of what most wort chillers can get the wort in just 25 minutes. In the past, it's taken something like 3-4 hours to get the wort from 80F/27C to pitching temperature, but this time that took only 30-40 minutes.

It definitely has showed me that even in the middle of the summer when it's in the upper 90s F outside, around 100 degrees, and the kitchen is also super hot, I can get wort from boiling to pitching temperature pretty quickly. I used 6kg (13 pounds) of store-bought ice that I got for about $3.50 and the rest from my ice maker or ice packs I had in my freezer.

Granted, if I had a wort chiller connected to a reservoir of ice water, it probably would have gotten down that far in half or one third the time.

EDIT: I'll also add that I did a hop stand with 10 grams of Idaho 7 at 77C / 170F. I had intended to start it at 80C / 176F, but I chilled it down faster than I expected. I did the hop stand starting at 77C / 170F and did it for 15 minutes, so pulled the hops out at a little above 50C / 122F. So I suppose that's one benefit of it being fast but not crazy fast.