My homemade wort chiller has sprung a leak and I think my latest batch is now infected as a result. So I'm in the market for a new wort chiller. I'm not bothered making another one, the price of the copper and the hassle for a sub par result doesn't seem worth it to me. So what are decent options on the Irish market at the moment.
And are plate chillers any good or should I just get a new, better immersion chiller?
Quote from: Qs on January 06, 2015, 01:10:27 PM
My homemade wort chiller has sprung a leak and I think my latest batch is now infected as a result. So I'm in the market for a new wort chiller. I'm not bothered making another one, the price of the copper and the hassle for a sub par result doesn't seem worth it to me. So what are decent options on the Irish market at the moment.
And are plate chillers any good or should I just get a new, better immersion chiller?
Also wondering the same,i bought my wort chiller but it still takes too damn long to chill a batch as i think the copper is too narrow, i think it is 10mm. ;D
Plate chillers are great but you need pumps in your system. You can gravity feed it but then you cant recirc it back to your kettle & you get an amazing instant cold break with them that will increase your trub loss a lot if you are chilling straight into your fermentor.
Ive had a duda diesel plate chiller & it was great. I have a blichmann one now & its even better (only upgraded from the duda diesel one as a mate of mine was in USA & brought it back for me)
Aliexpress has loads of cheapish plate chillers & coil chillers. Worth a look.
Duda Diesel have an ebay store.
Yeah I was wondering that about the plate chillers, don't really want to buy a pump as well. So gravity feeding them is worse than an IC you reckon?
Another question for ICs, is SS better than copper or vice versa?
Quote from: Qs on January 06, 2015, 04:04:47 PM
Yeah I was wondering that about the plate chillers, don't really want to buy a pump as well. So gravity feeding them is worse than an IC you reckon?
Not worse. It doesnt make any difference to the beer, You'll just have a lot of cold break in your FV so less beer going to keg after ferment. You can brew more to allow for it.
I'm pretty tempted to splurge on something from Jaded Brewing (http://jadedbrewing.com/collections/frontpage) in the states. The Hydra or King Cobra look like they'd be amazing. Also this review by Brulosophy (http://brulosophy.com/2014/09/23/the-hydra-immersion-chiller-by-jaded-brewing-a-review/) makes them sound great (although they do sponsor him).
Any good reason I shouldn't splurge on one of these?
Quote from: Qs on January 06, 2015, 04:19:02 PM
Another question for ICs, is SS better than copper or vice versa?
Copper is a much better conductor of heat than stainless steel but stainless is less susceptable to damage by caustic cleaning agents or denting. Heat transfer is dependant upon the contact surface area therefore the bigger the diameter and longer the coil is the better it will perform, plus moving the wort around the coil by stirring etc will reduce cooling time much more than the difference between materials. Aesthetics and price play a role also with many brewers preferring the look of all stainless equipment plus it will probably last longer and therefore less likely to puncture and impact on the brew as your previous copper chiller did.
In large breweries the cooling water is coloured so that any leaks are made apparent which might be worth thinking about if you are ever thinking about using rain water butt as your cooling water. Another safety point is that the product is kept at a higher pressure in plate heat exchangers than the cooling medium so that in the event if a leak the wort flows into the cooling water rather than the reverse which would contaminate the wort.
Quote from: Qs on January 06, 2015, 05:54:00 PM
I'm pretty tempted to splurge on something from Jaded Brewing (http://jadedbrewing.com/collections/frontpage) in the states. The Hydra or King Cobra look like they'd be amazing. Also this review by Brulosophy (http://brulosophy.com/2014/09/23/the-hydra-immersion-chiller-by-jaded-brewing-a-review/) makes them sound great (although they do sponsor him).
Any good reason I shouldn't splurge on one of these?
I was just looking at these. I'm thinking I might splash out on a king cobra at some stage I'll be brewing in a keggle but usually 5 gallon batches.
Quote from: Greg2013 on January 06, 2015, 01:35:40 PM
Quote from: Qs on January 06, 2015, 01:10:27 PM
My homemade wort chiller has sprung a leak and I think my latest batch is now infected as a result. So I'm in the market for a new wort chiller. I'm not bothered making another one, the price of the copper and the hassle for a sub par result doesn't seem worth it to me. So what are decent options on the Irish market at the moment.
And are plate chillers any good or should I just get a new, better immersion chiller?
Also wondering the same,i bought my wort chiller but it still takes too damn long to chill a batch as i think the copper is too narrow, i think it is 10mm. ;D
10mm is actually the standard size. Most people in the US use 3/8th inch which is about 9.5mm; I THINK that's the inside diameter, not the OD, though.
Adam
I built a counterflow chiller which chills 25l in about 5 mins. I love for speed but it requires a bit more setup than an ic and I had to buy a pump. I reckon you could build a great 1/2" IC for about 80.
I have spent a pretty INSANE amount of time considering a ridiculous number of factors in wort chillers and I've gone through an immersion chiller (with and without recirculation) a plate chiller and am VERY close to finalizing my decision on a counterflow chiller. I've looked at many alternative types of chillers, too including double pipe, tube and shell, and comercial brewery plate and shell designs. (And counterflow options using regular copper, convoluted copper, recirculated and single-pass; multi-stage chillers, too.)
After wasting my life by spending far too much time researching esoteric details I can make a few well-informed generalizations:
- Unless you are doing very large batch sizes (>10 gallons) it is VERY difficult to recommend anything other than a good immersion chiller with a recirculation arm aka the "Jamil-style immersion chiller"
- If you make a lot of really hoppy beers, you should really lean towards an immersion chiller
- If you plan to do single-pass chilling with a counterflow or plate chiller you need to plan what you will do about trub; either let it settle and siphon off of it or use the dump valve if you have a conical. Single pass chilling with a counterflow / plate chiller is best if you have a conical and can just dump the cold break material.
- Counterflow chillers have less clogging and cleaning issues than plate chillers
- If you are really want a counterflow chiller check out Jaded Brewing's option which allows you to take it apart and visibly inspect it and physically clean it with a brush. -The only homebrewer sized plate chiller that allows you to dismantle it for cleaning costs $750 from Sabco, so from that perspective the Jaded offering is a deal!
- Copper is a great choice of material for a chiller. You want a tiny bit of copper somewhere in your brewery as a yeast micronutrient but the copper also neutralizes unpleasant sulfur compounds that you may get from hops, fermentation (downstream), lager malt, water or over-treatment of chlorinated water with camden tablets. Copper transfers heat considerably better than stainless. Many of the people who have purchased the stainless convoluted counterflow chillers quickly resell them on HBT or Ebay after one or two uses when they get very poor cooling performance out of them.
- Convoluted copper DOES result in significantly higher efficiency than regular counterflow chillers but all of the commercially available offerings only include 12 feet of tubing which really is less than ideal and won't get you straight to pitching temps unless you run the wort VERY slowly. The Exchillerator from www.brickriverbrew.com (website fairly unreliable -watch their youtube video) is a GREAT alternative counterflow chiller that includes 16'-25' of copper tubing AND uses a high turbulance convoluted-like technique to create very high efficiencies. The main problem is that the outside of their chiller is PEX tubing which won't last forever like copper / stainless and is actually susceptible to damage from UV light. (if you cover it in foil to block light form getting to the PEX tubing you should be good-to-go for many years.
There is a lot of additional data and discussion points behind many of these recommendations but honestly the Jamil whirlpool immersion chiller is VERY hard to beat and the Jaded offering offer even more performance.
I've been chilling with an immersion chiller in my whirlpool boil kettle for the last 4 brews and the speed of chilling is INCREDIBLE when I just suppliment the whirlpool by putting my plastic mash paddle into my cordless drill and making a CRAZY fast whirlpool with it. I'm also chilling the entire volume of wort rapidly (important for DMS formation but more importantly to prevent the evolution of aromatic hop oils and to halt isomerization so that my nice hop aromas don't just turn into more bitterness). The immersion chiller also means that cold break stays in the kettle and not the fermenter. Easy and verifiable cleaning, too.
Serious gadget-obsessed American homebrewers have been switching from Immersion to Plate or Counterflow chillers and back again to Immersion+whirlpool chillers in droves, lately. When Americans who are obsessed with gadgets start selling their fancy plate chillers and going back to immersion, you should pay attention because its for a reason.
So far I've mentioned two of the new chiller companies that are out there so I'll mention "Zchillers, too". They're a new guy in the all copper convoluted counterflow space but unfortunately they don't really bring anything new from the established guys; if they had a 16' length chiller for $200 USD or less then they'd have something.... I don't think they offer much over the existing options other than a temporary 15% off coupon code right now...
Adam
I AM switching to counterflow but that's simply because I want a counterflow chiller to double as a heat exchanger for HERMS mashing AND for chilling.
Quote from: Vermelho on January 07, 2015, 10:18:43 PM
I built a counterflow chiller which chills 25l in about 5 mins. I love for speed but it requires a bit more setup than an ic and I had to buy a pump. I reckon you could build a great 1/2" IC for about 80.
I agree, but if you already have a pump, save a small bit of the copper and make a jamil-style recirculation arm. (Or if you don't get a 5 euro plastic mash paddle and put it into a cordless power drill and whirlpool the whole volume of wort for the first 6 minutes you're chilling -you'll get down below DMS formation temps EASILY within 6 minutes with the wort whirlpooling.)
Adam
I take it you reckon hot side aeration's a myth.
I'm curious: I don't have an opinion, although I try to minimize it even if it's only a superstition.
Quote from: mr hoppy on January 07, 2015, 10:47:14 PM
I take it you reckon hot side aeration's a myth.
I'm curious: I don't have an opinion, although I try to minimize it even if it's only a superstition.
Not sure I understand the relevance of the question to the topic of wort chillers...
I could see how someone could leap to some weird conclusion that recirculation chilling back into the kettle would result in aeration but you just make sure that the return is below the surface.
In general, though, no Hot Side Aeration isn't a significant concern even if there is some level of truth behind it. Well, it's not a significant issue unless you do something really dumb/non-standard (no boil / no chill), anyway.
Well I ordered a Hydra from Jaded. Can't wait to try it out, it better be good.
Did you use a shipping service? When I checked out the cost plus shipping I instantly lost the urge to buy haha
I just paid what the site asked for. It was expensive but I figured its cheaper than a plate chill and a pump.
Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.)
This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.
Adam
Quote from: biertourist on January 08, 2015, 08:29:50 PM
Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.) But, no I don't think it's a significant concern most of the time. (I've been reading more stuff from Denny Con, who actually tests his oxygen levels and has been doing some structured tasting of his beers before and after modifying processes to involve less hot side air introduction and HSA might not be fully in the "myth" category. Unlikely in typical cases, yes; myth, no.)
This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.
Adam
Quote from: biertourist on January 07, 2015, 11:33:06 PM
Not sure I understand the relevance of the question to the topic of wort chillers...
You're right, I could have made it clearer but I was looking at this:
Quote
I agree, but if you already have a pump, save a small bit of the copper and make a jamil-style recirculation arm. (Or if you don't get a 5 euro plastic mash paddle and put it into a cordless power drill and whirlpool the whole volume of wort for the first 6 minutes you're chilling -you'll get down below DMS formation temps EASILY within 6 minutes with the wort whirlpooling.)
Quote from: biertourist on January 08, 2015, 08:29:50 PM
Briefly back to HSA: I DO think that Hot Side Aeration at a homebrew scale and with typical home brew setups will be more of a concern than in commercial breweries because of our much higher surface area to volume ratios and because most of our transfers involve additional introduction of oxygen -we don't have closed systems like most large commercial breweries. (And most / all? of the research around HSA has been focused on the big mega breweries.)
This is also why DMS formation really isn't an issue at a homebrew scale (much higher surface area to volume ratio means we evolve off much more DMS much faster than the big guys) -as long as you don't do something like "no chill" brewing with lager malt.
Adam
I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.
Adam, every time you mention no chill I think of this thread ???
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/dumping-batch-infected-139563/
and here's the punchline
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/dumping-batch-infected-139563/index5.html#post1588007
ugliest thing I've ever seen on a home-brew forum and then some
sorry that's about a million miles off topic - but it's a serious advert for getting some sort of a chiller!
Quote from: Qs on January 09, 2015, 01:24:05 AM
I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.
Certainly contradicts what most commenters on most home brew forums say these days. Most of the true experts are focused on macro lager production and mega scale breweries and when we take those generalizations of VERY different home brew systems we often leap to the wrong conclusion.
You don't want DMS but its only a significant concern when a large % of your basemalt is pilsner or lager malt; DMS is rapidly formed and evolved off during a vigorous boil and the precursors only turn to DMS and remain in the beer a temperatures between 145F (estimate from memory but this is definitely within the "Safe zone" and probably bit low) and just below boiling. The rate of evaporation and therefore DMS evolution is based upon how vigor the boil is and the surface area to volume ratio.
So as long as you have a vigorous 60 min boil in a home-brew sized batch and you rapidly chill your beer from boiling down to 145F or lower you should be good-to-go even with lager malt. By all means play it safe with a 90 min boil if you want, but DMS is most apparent in light colored beers that will be needlessly darkened by the extended boil, you're also wasting energy and extending your brew day if you do it and you don't need to.
Adam
The issue with Hot Side Aeration isn't that it's a "myth" in that it doesn't happen, no serious scientist thinks that it's a "myth" although I'll admit that I certainly heard people say this before and attribute it to Dr. Charles Bamforth (I've said myself that it's a "myth" before many times and thought that, myself), but I'm learning that the truth is a bit more complicated...
Hot Side Aeration was considered a huge boogie man and was getting WAY too much focus by some brewers as some sort of brewing boogie man that was responsible for all sorts of beer related problems. HSA is a real thing and it absolutely happens, Dr. Charles Bamforth was responding to that and his super in depth look at the subject (in big brewery conditions, mind you) and his summary in the 2009 Brewing Network interview was basically that he finds that we're way over focused on HSA and that he feels like HSA isn't anywhere as big of a deal as people were making it out to be and that there are actually just as many (he argues more) ways that hot side aeration can positively impact the final beer. -Having said that Dr. Bamforth was in the minority of serious brewing scientists taking that stance that HSA has a net positive impact on beer.
I think the idea that we dont' want to be overly focused on one brewing boogieman (except for maybe general sanitization) because it will cause us to lose track of the bigger picture is a GREAT stance to take, BUT because people have taken the 2009 advice of Dr. Bamforth and are communicating it as "HSA is a myth; it doesn't exist", the pendelum has now swung too extreme to the other side.
In the search of constantly improving and perfecting our beer there becomes a point in time in which HSA could be the main detriment to your beer quality, especially light colored beers. MANY, MANY very experienced and scientifically minded homebrewers can tell you that they will absolutely see and taste a difference in beers that have been highly aerated while recirculation mashing -say with a rotating / spraying sparge arm, for example. In Denny Conn and Drew Beechum's new book "Experimental Homebrewing", they talk about the impacts that they've seen in side-by-side batches of beer with one overly aerated on the hotside and one that wasn't.
Like everything in brewing the general advice is based upon typical situations, and especially from the real serious professionals like Dr. Bamforth, it's usually geared towards what happens in a large commercial brewery that is very different than ours. We want to look to the theory that we get from folks like Dr. Bamforth and then see how it applies to our homebrew scales and then work backwards and figure out what's happening when it doesn't. -Crazy things like recirculation mashing that sprays a fine mist of wort through the air for the entirety of a 60 minute mash is certainly WAY outside the realm of anything that would happen in a large macro brewery and therefore we're going to see a significantly different result.
As a general rule, HSA shouldn't be a significant boogie man that makes us lose focus on more important items but we should know that it's NOT a "myth" and that if we're more susceptible to it at a home brew scale than macro breweries. We don't want to do overly dumb things that would introduce tons of aeration on the hot side.
-Having said all of that the question of whether me using a drill to aid my whirlpool and chilling is going to be a serious risk of hot side aeration that's an incredibly smart question that I hadn't thought about and now I'm wondering about it... -I don't know how quickly these hot side aeration reactions take to occur; that would help answer that question. I can get from near boiling to down to 145F in about 5 minutes easily while doing this, but is that long enough for HSA to occur? Another question: most reaction are accelerated at high temps, is there a temp below which we go that HSA isn't really a concern any more? -Ex: Can I just wait for my whirlpool kettle+immersion chiller to drop below say 160F and then start to use my drill+mash paddle safely?
I think I'm going to start playing it more safe by letting the wort naturally chill down to say 120F in the whirlpool before I pull out the drill to finish getting it down to 68F. (So thanks for the feedback; really good point. I am certainly injecting a TON of air into my wort using the drill mashpaddle whirlpool method.)
Adam
Quote from: mr hoppy on January 08, 2015, 10:05:15 PM
Quote from: biertourist on January 07, 2015, 11:33:06 PM
Not sure I understand the relevance of the question to the topic of wort chillers...
You're right, I could have made it clearer but I was looking at this:
Quote
I agree, but if you already have a pump, save a small bit of the copper and make a jamil-style recirculation arm. (Or if you don't get a 5 euro plastic mash paddle and put it into a cordless power drill and whirlpool the whole volume of wort for the first 6 minutes you're chilling -you'll get down below DMS formation temps EASILY within 6 minutes with the wort whirlpooling.)
Oh... Yea... I should've thought of that.
That's a really good point and you're probably right; I've been overly focusing on speeding up my rate-of-chilling and this is probably a super crazy intense amount of oxygen introduction while the wort is still really hot. HSA is real and this is probably way too much oxygen introduced at too high of a temp.
i'm going to let the natural whirlpool + immersion chiller get down to 100-120F before I begin to use the mash paddle+drill to get the rest of the way down to yeast pitching temps so I can avoid the risk of hot-side aeration. (I guess I just need to be a little bit more patient.)
I'm expecting 3 batches from now to be using a recirculated counterflow chiller so this will all be a moot point then, but very good point; whipping 8 ppm of oxygen into my wort at high temps is probably a really bad idea.
Adam
Quote from: Qs on January 09, 2015, 01:24:05 AM
I'm not saying you are wrong but don't both of these points sort of contradict what most experts say these days? IE DMS is something to be worried about and HSA is not.
Certainly contradicts what most commenters on most home brew forums say these days. Most of the true experts are focused on macro lager production and mega scale breweries and when we take those generalizations of VERY different home brew systems we often leap to the wrong conclusion.
DMSYou don't want DMS but its only a significant concern when a large % of your basemalt is pilsner or lager malt; DMS is rapidly formed and evolved off during a vigorous boil and the precursors only turn to DMS and remain in the beer a temperatures between 145F (estimate from memory but this is definitely within the "Safe zone" and probably bit low) and just below boiling. The rate of evaporation and therefore DMS evolution is based upon how vigor the boil is and the surface area to volume ratio.
So as long as you have a vigorous 60 min boil in a home-brew sized batch and you rapidly chill your beer from boiling down to 145F or lower you should be good-to-go even with lager malt. By all means play it safe with a 90 min boil if you want, but DMS is most apparent in light colored beers that will be needlessly darkened by the extended boil, you're also wasting energy and extending your brew day if you do it and you don't need to.
Again, a lot of the focus on DMS has been on the mega US lager producers and they certainly need to worry about DMS; they use not only primarily very lightly kilned lager malts, but the US mega lager producers often use 6 row malt in their cereal cookers and 6 row malt has even more SMM (DMS precursor) than 2 row malt, for Budweiser, they also include corn in their beer, which itself contains DMS so DMS is a big deal there. They're in a worst-case scenario for DMS, for sure.
The recommendation to do a 90 min boil comes from a study for big breweries that says that at a typical large brewery the "half life" for DMS is 40 minutes, meaning that after a 60 min boil you've reduced 64.7% of the DMS that is in the malt and with a 90 minute boil you've reduced 79% of the DMS. You start getting into diminishing returns so to fully reduce it would take hours and hours and you'll royally screw up your malt boiling that long (no hope of making light lager for sure).
My problem is that at the same time we know for sure that different brewing systems get rid of DMS MUCH faster. Boil kettles with built in calandrias reduce DMS much faster than normal steam jacketed boil kettles and mega breweries with the "Merlin" system that basically flash boil wort by passing it over a copper inverted cone at boil temps actually can reduce DMS too much so that the beer doesn't even taste like lager any more - big breweries have had to increase their flow rates over Merlin boilers to make sure that they have enough DMS so it still tastes like lager.
-We KNOW that this isn't a "one-size-fits-all" recommendation in the professional space and that it varies based upon your particular boil kettle, but obviously home brewer systems aren't going to be the focus of any funded research...
Having said all of that, I just sent an email to Brad Smith to try and get his source on this "40 minute DMS Half-life" article and I'm going to submit an AHA Research Fund scholarship to try and get someone to lend me the equipment / pay for the lab tests to actually test DMS reduction on a home brew scale now because it just sounds like a lot of fun.
Adam
To be honest if it's your own beer and you can't pick up on HSA then why stress about it, once you're not selling it or putting it in for competitions whereby it might make a small difference. Brewers stress over for example skunk flavours and use dark bottles or Tetra hops to reduce it, but the Mexicans put a slice of lemon in the top of the bottle to hide it and nobody notices :-)
Hydra arrived today (got stung for €50 extra by customs >:( ). I can't wait to brew now.
I ended up building a Jaded Brewing inspired immersion chiller with two coils of 10m copper. It's not the prettiest but it works well. I tested it on a 20 litre batch over the weekend and it chilled to 21C in 12 mins which I was delighted about. I did constant whirlpooling also and the hose feed was over 50' long which probably affected pressure slightly but I'm still fairly pleased. It cost me €72 in total and I had the compression fittings for the ends. I'd say it could be done for €80 or cheaper if you can get good copper pricing, I just used woodies.
What a beauty :P