Cooling wort in drought

[slipperyox]

Hi All,
I'm on a private well, and i'm sure those on mains water may be at risk soon from cuts and lowered pressure.

Has anyone any other setups for cooling without using water or the container method?

I was thinking of cooling 40l antifreeze to -5 or so, and pumping it into my wort cooler via the antifreeze tank and small pump.

Just wondering how the copper pipe would hold out with -5 glycol in contact with 100C?

(I know its my first post, probably should have intro'd, but I gave up alcohol for 8 years ( and home brewing) and only started again this year. Previously worked in commercial brewing (laboratory), but left it 25 years ago, based in Dundalk).
 Nice to see an active site!

[mick02]

Hey,

Welcome to the forum. This was the case 2 summers ago when the hosepipe ban was in place. For this I just transferred the wort to my fermenter and then chilled it in the fridge using a PC fan to recirculate the air (Some figures here about the efficiency of using a fan versus not using a fan). By the following morning the wort was at pitching temperature. As for using antifreeze and copper piping I personally would be concerned that the copper might split. What might be an option to get your wort down to temp quicker would be to fill a bucket with water, salt and ice (or indeed cooled antifreeze) and put in immersion chiller in there then run your hose through the immersion chiller and then into your counterflow (assuming you have this equipment) granted you will be using water but you should not need half as much to get the wort down to temp.

Let us know what you end up doing and if it was effective or not)

Mick

[slipperyox]

Yes, Ill let you know.
But need to get a spare chest freezer to chill the 40 litres of antifreeze first..

[johnrm]

You could use a water butt.
Gather water once, be it from your well, rain etc.
Use this as your cooling source.
Feed the heated cooling water back to the butt.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

Other more extreme options are to switch to no chill brewing for a bit, or chuck out a few brews with kveik where you just need to cool down to 35-40C or so

[Phil.cork]

I was just about to start a topic about this and found this thread. I was intrigued by the whole no chill brewing as I kinda like the idea of having a few cubes of wort ready to chuck in the fermenter at times. Doe's anyone know where you'd get the 25l cubes though? I'm sure some googling would answer it but I like talking to people and I'm lazy

[Phil.cork]

So I got a wee bit nerdy and took a break at work today to try and figure out how much ice would be needed to chill the wort down thinking I could boil and then freeze a few bottles of water and use them to top up post boil.
I came up with this spread sheet where you adjust the volume post boil until you're targeted volume into fermenter comes up and this gives you the mass of ice needed.

I'm sure someone cleverer with excel or maths than me could figure out how to have it adjust for targeted SG of post boil wort so I have included all my formulae and reference for the SC (C) of wort. the difference in C fro a wort or 1.19 or 1.06 is 3.8-3.6 respectively so I went with the lower as a fixed value.

Anyway here it is feel free to change/improve it and post back.
Also feel free to point out where I have made a big error in my calculations

Google Drive Link to Spreadsheet