Wort Chiller hose giving off flavor?

[Tall_Yotie]

Howdy all.

Last batch I did was a double IPA. Temps were pretty good, high 60's to low 70's as far as I was told (brewed with father in law at his place). Being a paranoid fellow, I wiffed the yeast cake and it had a bad scent that I got from ruined beer caught in a heat wave (cardboard like, rubbery almost) but went away with a slosh or two of the bucket. Part of me is concerned that I am searching for it though after having lost a couple batches to a heat wave. I cracked one open to test (1 week old, I know, still young), and it tasted amazing, but had a plastic aftertaste, and a bit of that in scent. Again, it is young, and maybe i am searching for it, need a blind taste tester.

The immersion wort chiller I am using is rather old, when my father-in-law had it he left it on the porch and some bugs crawled into the water tubes (washed and cleaned it off good after that though). As some of the tubing is submerged during the last bit of the boil, is there any chance I am pulling off flavors from the vinyl tubing itself? Or does that just not happen?

 

[azscoob]

The immersion chiller should be copper tubing in the wort, the rubber hose would not usually be in contact with the wort so there would not be any transfer of flavor from the hoses to the beer, you just run cold water through it to cool the beer, a more likely suspect would be chlorine in your brewing water or using water from a garden hose that is not intended to be used for potable water, just a few things to think about.

 

[Tall_Yotie]

Apologies, I think I was not clear in some places.

The immersion chiller has clamped onto it two sections of vinyl tubing, one at each end of the copper. At the end of those vinyl tubes is the hose receptacle. The line feeding into the wort chiller (bottom coil) is submerged into the wort, so a part of the vinyl tube is sitting in the boil. The hose does not touch the wort at all, I know to avoid that.

As far as it being chlorine in the water, this brew was done off of a well and has no chlorine. No chlorine based anything touched the equipment either.

 

[Reelale]

If you are boiling vinyl hose, you will get a vinyl hose taste in your beer. As azsscoob was saying, only the copper coils of an immersion chiller should be in the wort. You really need 2 straight pieces of copper tubing that run outside of the BK where the other hoses are connected.

 

[azscoob]

If you are boiling vinyl hose, you will get a vinyl hose taste in your beer. As azsscoob was saying, only the copper coils of an immersion chiller should be in the wort. You really need 2 straight pieces of copper tubing that run outside of the BK where the other hoses are connected.

Exactly! if the legs of the copper are too short to prevent vinyl hose from being in contact with the wort, try picking up some copper tube from the hardware store, (Ace sells it by the foot) and pick up some copper compression couplers for connecting two pipe sections together, or better yet get a solder in coupler, and use potable water solder (no lead) and extend the legs up and out of the kettle, this should take care of the plastic flavored beer.

 

[Tall_Yotie]

Damned!

In my most recent batch I thought this would be an issue and bent the copper up so it wouldn't have the vinyl in the wort. Thing is, when I got the chiller it was built like this (vinyl in the liquid shape), so figured that is how it should be.

I was going to get/make a new one anyway, so this will take care of that. Thanks for the info guys!

 

[shamrockdoc]

It would be awesome if we had pics of this wort chiller

 

[Catt22]

IMO, the problem is not the chiller or the vinyl tubing contacting the wort. It's more likely the high fermentation temperatures. It's also likely that the fermentation temperatures were considerably higher than you think they were. Even with the ambient temps in the low 70's, you must remember that the yeast will generate considerable heat of it's own and especially so when it's rock'n in the warm temps. The actual fermentation temperature could have been as high as the low 80's at some point when the yeast was going full bore. Just my take on it; nothing more and I could be completely off base.

 

[Tall_Yotie]

As I have done batches at the location before, and it was cooler than before, and I haven't had that issue. May be a different yeast strain though. I may just get a bunch of those temperature strips for the fermentation buckets so I can see what they end up at.