Wort chilling help required

[Karl Hayes]

Hi folks.

I wonder if anyone had any experience on cooling 80L of wort, quickly. I have access to medium sized 7,500BTU to 12,500BTU) AC units and the ideas I'm kicking around my head are

• to replace the AC condenser system with a copper tube, closed loop immersion chiller coil, or
• to use the original condenser to chill a large container of glycol or brine and pump that through an immersion chiller, or
• fill a chest freezer with about 250L of brine and reduce the temps slowly over a few days, then use this as a sort of reservoir for pumping through an immersion chiller on brew day

I'd prefer not to go down the plate chiller path. Any thoughts anyone?

Cheers.

[Druid]

There's another factor that can help you with counter chilling - avoiding temperature stratification due to laminar flow in your cooling water as it flows around the wort carrying tube. Look at the design for the chillzilla for an illustration..

There used to be a guy on this forum who went by the name of Vesku who built a tool to form the inner copper pipe that carried the wort into a shape that induced turbulence in the cooling water as it flowed past it for just this reason. Looked for his photos of it but couldn't find them.

[Karl Hayes]

Thanks. CounterFlow is out for a variety of reasons but I've taken on board the rest of your advice.

[Karl Hayes]

Yup, I'll go down that route with a 20 Mt coil in the wort and a 10 Mt pre-chilling coil in a glycol bath if necessary. Thanks

[william mc]

counterflow wort chiller on trade me Chillzilla 

[Justin M]

I cool 100 litre batches with an immersion chiller. Yesterday it got to 18 degrees in 28 minutes. Need to be whirl pooling as per the mrmalty website. Avoids cleaning and other issues with plate chillers. Let me know if you want to know more...

[Karl Hayes]

Hi Justin. Can you give me the specifications of your IC? Thanks

[Justin M]

Sure thing. It's 100 ft half inch copper. Helps to have trade price on this, which makes it around 250 ish, so not super cheap. But it works very well and is easy to clean. This is however sized for a 200l kettle so you could probably get away with a smaller coil in a smaller pot. The reason it works so well is that even with the tap on full throttle, the water is exiting the chiller at wort temp which means that it is very efficient (due to the amount of copper in the wort). A said however, a whirlpool via pump is essential.

[Karl Hayes]

Thanks for your advice. I'll be going with 20 Mts of 1/2" copper in a 120L kettle. According to Mr Malty, this will be best but I'll have a counterflow chiller on standby just in case with wort in one direction and AC refrigerant going the other.

[Scarrfie]

Karl I will throw in a wildcard here, probably not practical but hey you never know. If you have a freezer that you can chill down a slurry in then put the kettle directly in the slurry. That just means you need a hoist of some description to execute. It won't be as fast as some other methods but it will get there.

Personally I have a bath outside that I keep full of water and dump my pot with 20L batch in there. This time of year it will cool to under 25 in about 90 minutes, in summer probably double that. It takes the top 30-40°C off pretty quick though.

[Karl Hayes]

Hey dude, thanks for the advice but moving 100KG will not be practical given the structure of my brewing area.

[Peter Smith]

Plan b :  glycol unit used to chill say 100L of water to 2 degrees  have an immersion chiller in this and another in wort linked so the first is like a pre-chill of tap water,   glycol unit will come in handy for the 100L fermenter as well.

 

[Karl Hayes]

Yup, there's a groundswell of opinion that and immersion chiller followed by glycol assisted chilling will be best. I've had a few semi-commercial brewers into the back of my shop to see the proposed setup and their advice pretty much mirrors yours.  Thanks