Wort Chillers
- One thing brewers want is to chill their wort as rapidly as possible. They don’t want to shock their yeast. They don’t want the sterile nutrient-rich wort to pick up any unwanted guests. In addition to contamination by bacteria and wild yeasts, a slow cooling of the wort can lead to off flavors in the beer. Identifiable by vegital/corn-like favors. Nasty. Also, a good fast chilling of the wort will produce a clearer finer product as proteins that cause a “chill haze”, a common clouding of the beer when chilled to fridge temps precipitate out prior to fermentation.
- Immersion Chiller – Easy to make! Buy 50′ of coiled soft copper and wrap it around a paint can or a corny keg. Buy some garden hose fittings, hose clamps and some tubing. The basic idea is that you make yourself a radiator, through which cold water flows, absorbing the heat of the hot wort. ** it’s important to have the cold water (input) coiling at the top, and exhaust water coming up from the bottom.** Some say the Immersion chiller is better because you sterilize it for each use by placing it in the boil kettle for the last 15 minutes of the boil. The Immersion Chiller is the less efficient way of cooling wort with a “chiller”, because the brewer leaves the hose/sink on for 20+minutes to bring the wort from 180F to 80F, and is even worse when trying to cool 10 gallon batches. Eco-aware brewers collect this hot exhaust for post-brewing clean up.
- Counter-Flow Chiller – More difficult to make! Requires 20-30′ of soft copper that is run thru an equal amount of garden hose. Some designs are tightly coiled. I am considering less coil and a wider size. The basic idea is that cold water enters the chiller from the bottom, by the output- and exits out the top. “Countering” the flow of very hot wort that passes through the center tubing of copper, which is surounded by the cold water within the garden hose. The Counter-Flow Chiller is far more efficient as the wort is chilled to/nearly to “pitching temperature”, 60-75F, by the time it exits the tubing.
- - ONCE YOU GROW UP TO BE A “BIG BOY” – or get to put “brewer” on your Taxes as your occupation, you’ll be familiar with a plate and frame heat exchanger – (ex. this is a great explanation, “It is not uncommon that a Plate Heat Exchanger will have the same thermal capacity as a Shell & Tube five times larger.” – Shell and Tube- meaning – counter flow. So NOW I’ve found myself…. a Shirron –
The biggest concern is properly cleaning the heat exchanger. there are more possiblilties for protein/hop buildup and that’s a prime spot for a bacterial infection. Caustics and the like are a great way to go, backflushing and also “filling the crossovers” – or jamming it full by holding back on the out put while the pump fills every spot with hot cleaners! It’s efficient and fun. Why not?
