I.C. and temp. control

[dennis mathews]

Thanks to Damian, Stu and JackoNZ I have an immersion cooler from Brewers Coop and a TempMate from Craftbrewer is on it's way. Bidding on Trademe for an old fridge then I'm set to make some seriously good homebrew.

[DP]

Sweet! You shouldn't have to pay more than $50 for a full-sized fridge. I managed to get two identical F&P Leonard fridges (1350x640x710) -- one with a broken thermostat for $30 and a fully-functional one for $50. I hacked out the butter conditioner and thermostat of the broken one, wired it to permanently on and hooked up the TempMate to it to switch it on and off. I've got a heat pad in there too. The other fridge I use for storing bottles but eventually will become my kegorator. I've found the trick with buying fridges on TradeMe is to be prepared to wait a couple of months and lose lots of bids.

When I first got my IC it used to take something like 30 minutes to get down to 30deg and it was only after a few brews that I found that if you constantly jiggle it the temp plummets to 20deg in only 10 minutes (helped, of course, by the fact that it's now winter and the water out of the mains is a good 5-10deg cooler). I think the coils must build up a buffer of cool wort around them and decrease its effectiveness. Jiggling it brings it into contact with the hotter wort.

Anyway, good luck!

[dennis mathews]

Could you stir the hot wort with a sterile spoon. Does providing a gap between the coils make any difference?

[DP]

Yep, that would achieve the same effect. That's kind of what the whirlpool chillers do but with wort instead of a spoon. I'm anal about exposing my wort to the air and so keep the lid on with just the tubes of the chiller sticking out from under it.

I haven't tried loosening my coil but it quite possibly could make a difference so long as you don't end up with copper above the water line. Might have to read up on that. Perhaps someone else reading this will have some information?

[edit: THIS looks quite interesting and is probably achievable with the our current chillers. It kind of makes sense to me that the more surface area of hot wort you touch with it the faster it will cool down. Obviously you still have the same surface area but less parts of the chiller tubing will be touching -- and trying to cool -- other bits of tubing above and below it.]

[Barry]

check out Jamils whirpool chiller. Makes a big difference over a standard IC:
http://www.mrmalty.com/chiller.php

[vdog]

I can vouch for that - added a whirlpool to ours at the last brew a couple of weeks ago, and dropped 70 litres of boiling wort to under 60deg in five minutes, and down to high 20's in about 20min.

[Arron]

Hey Dennis. I have an old fridge freezer you can have if you want to come get it.
I was using it for a fermentation fridge but have recently been given a new 1.

[dennis mathews]

Thanks Aaron but I believe I've found one. It is a fridge/freezer, not what I wanted but it'll do for now.

[dennis mathews]

Damian, what if you stirred the hot wort with a sterile spoon?

[jt]

what if you stirred the hot wort with a sterile spoon?

Pop your stirrer of choice in the kettle with the immersion chiller for the last 10-15 minutes of the boil, that'll sterilise it and you can stir with it - much more effective than jiggling