An Idea for a Worth Chiller
Hey all,
I just got an idea for a wort chiller and I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with my design. What I'm thinking of doing is making a chiller in the style of a counterflow that is contained in a vessel instead of a gardent hose. Home Depot sells 5 gallon buckets for cheap and I've already taken to using them for a good short term secondary vessel. I would be putting a 50' coil of 3/8" copper tubing inside the bucket with outlets at the top and bottom, then I would put a garden hose inlet at the bottom and an outlet at the top. Ice could be added to the middle of the bucket to further cools things and there would always be a good volume of cool water in contact with the heat sink. Also, does anyone think I could get away with not using the garden hose at all and just use ice water in the bucket? Is this design pathetic or does anyone use something like it themselves?
Edds
Are you talking about pumping the wort through the copper tubing?
Yeah, the wort goes through the copper tubing while it is immersed in the bucket with either a tap water flow through it or just in ice water.
the issue I see here is the copper heating very quickly and simply melting the ice. This is somewhat of the pre-chiller concept, where people in warm climates need to chill their chill water by flowing their too warm faucet water through a cooler/bucket of ice to effectively work in their CFC or IC.
I think why the CFC works so well is the direct exchange of the encased wort and the cold water, as well as the opposing directions.
It sounds kinda like a reverse HERMS setup.
Should work great, but I would be cautious about using anything near the temperature of icewater, simply because of the sugar content changing the freezing point of the wort, and making stoppage more likely.
I also thought of that before I built an IC. I also figured it would heat the water too quickly, requiring a constant ice replacement...and disposal of the melted ice water. Plus how to regulate the temp consistently would be too difficult I think...
John Palmer has a similar design for a Chiller in a PVC pipe and I've seen the wort chillers in homebrew stores they have a small Diameter copper pipe with tight coils in a PVC pipe .
http://www.howtobrew.com/appendices/appendixC.html
I like that design and it's what got me thinking about using a bucket. The bucket with lid at HD is only about $4, which is why I am thinking of using it instead of PVC, but the rest is all the same I suppose.
Rubberchrist wrote:
Should work great, but I would be cautious about using anything near the temperature of ice water, simply because of the sugar content changing the freezing point of the wort, and making stoppage more likely.
Actually as solute concentration goes up (ie increase amount of sugar or salt) the freezing point of the liquid goes down. Distilled water freezes at 32F, which is the temperature of an ice water bath, so it would be impossible to freeze your wort by bringing it down to 32F unless it is under enormous pressure.
edds design for a chiller should work nicely, although I would imagine that you would have to add more ice to the bucket before all the wort has run though the chiller. I actually made a similar contraption for chilling in the deep winter in New England. I was using an immersion chiller but my hose from the house was frozen, so I hooked up a second smaller immersion chiller in series to the one that went into the kettle. I placed the smaller chiller in a bucket with water and shoveled snow on top. My pump pushed water through both chillers creating a closed chilling system. As hot water flowed out of the chiller in the kettle it went though the second chiller in the bucket with ice water to cool the water back down and the pump pushed this cold water back through the chiller in the pot. This system was very efficient; the water coming out of the kettle chiller was really hot and was then cooled back into the 40s or 50s F in the smaller chiller. If instead you pumped your wort through the chiller in the bucket of ice water, I would imagine you would get the same cooling efficiency. The longer the copper, the cooler the wort would get. Just be careful of clogging the copper with hop debris!
So, should I even bother with the hose hook ups? I did decide that if I build my CFC like that, I will need to put a tube through the middle of the bucket to keep the water flowing around the coils instead of just displacing through the middle. I'm really torn here, I can make a traditional one with a garden hose for around $50-$60, but if the bucket idea works, then it's $35 for the copper coil plus hose fittings and some water proof expoxy.
If you have a pump already, and an immersion chiller already, could you just do a test run by immersing the IC in ice water in a bucket and pump boiling water through it?
That's a good idea for a dry run. For now, due to financial constraints and after reading more about ICs, it seems that as long as I do a 50' coil I should get a nice chill down. I've read about people having too much trouble trying to start siphons with the CFCs too. I really don't ever want to have to buy a pump. No offense to those who have the elaborate setups with keggles and dedicated structures and everything, but I don't think I'll ever get into it enough to buy all of that equipment. So for now it will be be an IC, and I'll just add a pre cooler if it takes too long for cooling action to happen. Another thing that occured to me is that I am probably loosing a lot of hop flavor with my current method and CFCs leave the wort hot in the pot too.
I built a CFC, only 30' coils, and tapped my aluminum turkey fryer kettle with a valve and let gravity do the work from counter top, to stool, to the floor. Actually it is pretty slick, chilling is done in about 15 minutes.
I'm sorry, I know i've said this before, but a plate chiller is 84 bucks, I got 2 polysulfone attachments for the in and out ports, and went to home depot, got some attachmens for the hoses, and ordered some hi temp food grade tubing. everything including shipping might have cost me 100 bucks.
There are advantages and disadvantages to a plate chiller, but the 2 biggest advantages are rapid chilling, and it cuts out a step by chilling right into your fermentor. I think this overwhelms the disadvantages of extreme cleaning of the internal plates. I can really taste the difference in my beer, although I did used to chill with ice.
I know these are considered to be the final word in wort cooling, but I have no interest in buying a pump to use with the chiller, and from what I can gather, a plate chiller needs to be used with a pump. I may still go back and build a CFC down the road, since I'll already have the main part I need with my IC coil. I'm really liking the idea of getting the whole volume of wort below the isomerization temp of the alpha acids so fast, and to prevent my flavor hops from being diminshed by the heat. I suppose I could use a hop back with a CFC to get my flavor hopping in, but that's just more elaboration on my procedure. I will likely revisit this down the road, perhaps after switching to all grain to make sure I'm still using the method I feel is best for what I am doing.
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