National Homebrew Club Ireland

Would it be worth keeping the old copper chiller.      Dropping it into a bucket of  ice water to get your wort below 20c. As a kind of prechiller..  How effective is this method?   

I nearly always have to refrigerate my vulnerable wort to get it to pitching temp..   Which is a bit of a pain as sealed buckets are hard to open when chilled..  And hard to pitch into while in a small fridge. 

Edit: Split from Bulldog Brewer thread

Quote from: Motorbikeman on October 14, 2016, 09:07:30 AM
Would it be worth keeping the old copper chiller.      Dropping it into a bucket of  ice water to get your wort below 20c. As a kind of prechiller..  How effective is this method?   

I nearly always have to refrigerate my vulnerable wort to get it to pitching temp..   Which is a bit of a pain as sealed buckets are hard to open when chilled..  And hard to pitch into while in a small fridge.

Should definitely work. Unless you have piles of ice, I'd chill to below 30-40 with just one because it should go down quick enough, and then connect the second one in the ice bucket to get it nice and low.

Never done it, but I believe that's exactly what our American friends do to get down to pitch temps especially in their hot summer. Trick would be to use normal water to get down to the twenties, then bring the prechiller into play to get down further. Copper would be ideal for this job.
My cold water comes from a surface pipe, so it's quite warm in summer (16º or so), perhaps 7º in winter. My freezer is too small to make ice realistic for me. ("Dearest, the reason your veggie burgers are melting in the sink is ... global warming??") I was thinking of putting a corny or some other vessel into the fridge, and chilling it down to <2 and use that to get the final push. If you had say 20L of wort @ 20º and 20L of chilled 2º water recirculating through your chiller, you'd end up close to 12º. It does take a good few hours to drop 10º in the fridge, and wort would be vulnerable. I'm a fan of blast-freezing the wort as quickly as possible after flame-out, to get the protective shield of yeast going.

This and a bucket..    http://www.tesco.ie/groceries/Product/Details/?id=258961797   

Quote from: Motorbikeman on October 14, 2016, 11:33:04 AM
This and a bucket..    http://www.tesco.ie/groceries/Product/Details/?id=258961797   

And this http://m.tesco.ie/mt/www.tesco.ie/groceries/Product/Details/?id=254880449

Quote from: Sorcerers Apprentice on October 14, 2016, 12:12:35 PM

Quote from: Motorbikeman on October 14, 2016, 11:33:04 AM
This and a bucket..    http://www.tesco.ie/groceries/Product/Details/?id=258961797   

And this http://m.tesco.ie/mt/www.tesco.ie/groceries/Product/Details/?id=254880449

The salt will lower the freezing point of the water allowing it to drop as low as  -6C



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Could we ask you guys who have done this before to kindly give a brief outline of how you use the ice, how much ice is needed, what wort temp you achieve? This is very interesting. I always considered lagers out of my range, but this could work. Perhaps a separate thread? Thanks.

I have never done it, but I would think it would be as simple as using all that salt and all that ice in 10L of water . 

In this bucket..

(https://s22.postimg.org/9qiiv9jlt/P1020770.jpg)

Maybe the Mods could move this to its own prechilling thread..   :)

Good call.  :)

I've used that method for brewing in the summer.
I picked up one of these smaller chillers and run it as a pre chiller.
http://www.geterbrewed.ie/copper-wort-chiller-for-10-litre-batches/

My water was coming about 20c from the tap and made chilling a right pain. Wouldn't get below 25c. Even running through this small chiller in ice water  I was getting about a 10c drop below mains temp. This got me right down to ale pitch temps and I recon will reach lager pitch temps in the winter.
A real handy cheep fix to an annoying temp problem.

Definitely going to get this up and running. Anything that cuts chilling time!

All sounds like a lot of trouble guys, the most effective method, even after using a beer chiller, I have of getting Pilsner wort down to Lager pitch temps 10-11 in 3-4 hours from 22 is in the fridge and to have a strong computer fan blowing air ideally the ones that come out of servers.
Try and direct the fan against the cold plate at the back of the fridge.
Word of warning it will run the compressor for 3-4 hours and put it under higher than normal working load.

Wouldn't say it's a lot more trouble then hooking up a standard wort chiller. It's just another thing to plug in.

Extra few tubes and any old bucket. No more hassle than rigging up a computer fan  :D

The fan is a permanent feature you only install it only once, it will cut your refrigeration elecky costs by 50% and beats the hell out of water sloshing around everywhere without looking like a plumbers merchants :P

Any pics of that set up CH.   Would like to try that also.

It's not complicated

My 4 fermentation chambers are all out in the shed and go from 2 (ambient -2)  to 17 (ambient 25)max

This one is glued onto top of fridge blowing down, runs on a 12v supply.
(http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20161014/27454cb8fa217c7878caf1e7ee5df0d4.jpg)

This other one is on my "redneck" ale chamber and just blows the heat around the chamber
The heater bar was mounted on the wall so I could fit 3 carboys in the chamber.

Will be up for one of Davides smart pids when they are released and can also operate a fan afaik

https://vimeo.com/187413079 (https://vimeo.com/187413079)


Coming back to the prechill idea, i have seen folks freeze milk or coke bottles and use them.
I went looking on Ali for stainless or copper coils to pre-chill jockey box Esque and found a few sub 40 but shipping was mad, a fan and transformer is less than half that.

Another alternative would be an inline beer chiller/cooler, if you have one lying around. 

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I have two immersion coils and a lidl submersible pump. The coils are connected up via garden hose fittings and splitters. The inputs of both coils are fed via a garden hose fed from a water butt. The incoming pipe is submerged in a container of about 10 litres of water that contains 8 freezer blocks. I got best results with putting them in the water about half an hour before use. In the summer it just about gets it to 20 C although the last 10 C is slow. Winter usage I don't need the ice blocks. I did use regular ice once & while it worked better/faster it meant having to source the ice @short notice & it was another hassle/complication. The freezer blocks are an easy compromise. Probably most important thing is to have a large enough supply of water.

Shanna

If you're using a garden water butt, I'd suggest adding some food colouring to the butt, if you have a leak anywhere it'll show up easier especially if there's a leak into the beer. Glycol chillers in breweries always have the glycol dyed blue.
If you're using a cross flow chiller add a valve on the beer outlet and throttle it down to create back pressure. That way if you have a leak, then the beer at higher pressure will leak into the water rather than the other way around.

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On my first encounter with an immersion chiller, it was a cold dark evening and I had been brewing outside. My phone rang and I went inside to answer it. Aboutp 20 mins later I went outside and from a different angle to where I had been standing I could see a fine jet of water spraying into my kettle from a small pinhead leak on the fitting of the immersion chiller.

Been there, dumped the batch. And the boil smelled great too, dammit.

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Did you not have a big u bend on the pipework?
Not a fan of 90 degrees connections at the top of immersion chillers, drips are always going to end up in your brew

Twas from back in the day before them fancy ubendy one were invented 😆
Regarding the other points we buy fancy stainless cross flow wort coolers and never check if there's any internal leaks allowing beer to mix with water. Hence the need I think for a valve on the beer outlet, particularly if you're using non potable water as your cooling media 

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Quote from: CH on October 15, 2016, 01:14:11 PM
Did you not have a big u bend on the pipework?
Not a fan of 90 degrees connections at the top of immersion chillers, drips are always going to end up in your brew

Never had a problem with that and both my chillers have 90 degree welded bends. I do however have a collar on my boiler that the bends are sitting against so that is probably why. As for the water its a good idea but given the state of the water I reckon the fermented wort would be so rank from what is in the water that it would be immediately obvious (well ranker than my normally is before anybody says it :-)) . Having said that never too big to take a tip on board and will be digging out the blue cake colouring just to be on the safe side.

Shanna