Wort Chilling

[hucklb]

I have been brewing extracts for about and year and just switched over to all grain. What is the target time for chilling a 6.5 gallon batch of wort using an immersion chiller? Any tricks for speeding up the process? Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Calypso]

As quickly as feasible. I get mine to pitching temp in ~20 minutes. Other people manage to do it in 7 minutes. Here are some things that help:
* Gently stirring the wort so that the chilled wort moves away from the coils, rather than sitting there acting like a buffer.
* More chiller surface area (from a longer coil, for example)
* Colder water, either from a different source or by employing something like a pre-chiller. Basically, water -> pre-chiller (sitting in an ice bath) -> immersion chiller

 

[jtratcliff]

it all depends on the temperature of your cooling water.... Cooler water means faster chilling. You'll also want to stir as you chill, or move your chiller around some.

Some folks will also use a second IC in a bucket of ice as a pre-chiller to get the final wort temp lower than straight water from the tap will allow.


EDIT TO ADD:
D'oh @Calypso beat me to it...

 

[ol-hazza]

Stirring made the biggest difference for me, I also used to have the out water running into a swamp cooler that my wort was sitting in but tbh stirring makes a much bigger difference

 

[55x11]

I have been brewing extracts for about and year and just switched over to all grain. What is the target time for chilling a 6.5 gallon batch of wort using an immersion chiller? Any tricks for speeding up the process? Thanks in advance for the help.

I used 50-ft, 3/8" inch copper tubing to make my own immersion chiller. I am happy to use longer tubing, even though it's a bit more expensive.

It has two sets of coils, as a result, inner coil and then going back to outer coil, and ends of the pipe stick out pretty far out of the pot (to avoid water getting back into wort from connections).

I boil the immersion chiller inside the wort for last 15 min or so to sterilize.
I place the entire pot (covered) into another, larger pot filled with iced water, and start circulating water (not very cold in my case, about 65 deg) through chiller.
In 2 min the temperature drops from 220F to 165F, after 6min it's 115F.
From then it's slower, but within 10 min I am under 100F. By the time I finish transferring into carboy, it's about 15min, under 80F and yeast is ready to be pitched. I think this is sufficiently fast for my purposes

If I wanted to go faster, I would fill a container with iced water and pump that, especially for final 5 min or so, instead of using fairly warm water from the faucet.

 

[jtratcliff]

I place the entire pot (covered) into another, larger pot filled with iced water, and start circulating water (not very cold in my case, about 65 deg) through chiller.

I think you're not making the best use of your ice... Use the tap water alone at first. The big Delta T between hot wort and tap water should fine to knock several 10s of degrees off the wort temp.

THEN use the ice once the wort has cooled some. You'll keep a larger Delta T and possibly cool those last few degrees faster.

 

[55x11]

I think you're not making the best use of your ice... Use the tap water alone at first. The big Delta T between hot wort and tap water should fine to knock several 10s of degrees off the wort temp.

THEN use the ice once the wort has cooled some. You'll keep a larger Delta T and possibly cool those last few degrees faster.

Ditto. that's actually more or less what I do. I drop almost all the ice later on, just a little bit to begin with. But my ice maker in my fridge can make quite a lot of ice so I am not limited by the ice amount anyways, so it's not a zero sum game. My outer pot water temperature is pretty close to 0C.

I am more limited by my lukewarm water coming out of the hose.