Chill Time

[bret america]

Question - what is your typical chill time?

I do a large ice bath and immersion chiller (using new SS Silver Serpent) but it still takes about 60 minutes and only get down to about 73-75 deg. i get down to about 80 in 30-40 minutes but it gets stuck there.

Any suggestions? I am a pretty simple guy and a plate chiller seems complex (maybe I am wrong).

thank you

 

[jeffpn]

Salt in your ice (Think homemade ice cream) and stir. I can walk you through making a counterflow chiller if you're interested. If you can solder and shove a copper tube through a garden hose, you can make one.

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

don't chill so fast after the boil, wait until at least 180 before you start the water, also your dependent on how cold the water is from your faucet, if your water is 70 you won't get any lower

 

[jeffpn]

Oops. I missed the immersion chiller part of his post. I only saw ice bath.

(I still think my counterflow chiller works better than an immersion chiller.)

 

[fire60]

I use a copper immersion chiller in the boil kettle with water straight from the tap (faucet for you) To get a fast chill down. You need to create a whirlpool and keep the wort moving around the coil. I get a drop to 20deg C in about 20 mins.

Pete.

 

[bret america]

thank you for the quick responses everyone.

Jeff - I would definitely like to build out something like your setup - but i keep it simple mainly because we do not have a lot of space. I will try the salt and keeping a continuous whirlpool going in the ice bath portion.

 

[jeffpn]

The salt goes in the ice, not the wort!!

 

[bret america]

What if I was making a Gose?

 

[MrBIP]

Thankful again to be on a well... apparently I get no chlorine and colder water. All natural from the ground, cold and pure.
Using a typical copper pipe immersion gets me from 180-200 (depending on how jumpy I am to start it) to sub-70 in no more than 20 minutes.

How about two chillers. One in an ice bath pre-chilling your tab water and one in the wort doing the chilling? I've read about that some. Salting the ice water seems like a good idea.

 

[Nosybear]

MrBIP: Your idea would work. You're just building a heat exchanger that could work either way. It's a little more complicated than it would be and less efficient - why not just cycle the wort through the heat exchanger (chiller) immersed in the salted ice water? I know, sanitation problems and all that. Salting could create a few problems - we're not making ice cream (or ice beer: I could imagine wort actually freezing in the lines done this way). You may as well just pump the ice water through the chiller (keeping the chiller moving in the wort or the wort moving around the chiller). One fewer moving parts and no need to sanitize the inside of the chiller. I'd rather expose ice water to contamination than wort!

 

[cearum]

Make sure you open the water up full blast and stir the wort while chilling. The stirring will help put warmer wort next to the chiller and move the colder stuff away.

From the following page. http://brulosophy.com/2014/12/22/18-ideas-to-help-simplify-your-brew-day/

"
Utilize Proper Chilling Techniques
Chilling a 5 gallon batch of beer with an immersion chiller should never take more than 20 minutes. When I first heard this, I was a bit bewildered, as my chill time using a 25′ x 3/8″ copper IC plopped into hot wort with the 09_HSA_KCIC_chillwater slowly flowing was closer to 45 minutes. The primary reason I bought a pump and plate chiller setup was to reduce my chill times, perhaps a few readers can relate. Not long after making this change, I realized how much I hated all that was involved in this new setup and reached out to JaDeD Brewing seeking advice on how to use an IC more efficiently. I learned 2 important things from that exchange:

1. Keep source water flowing at full blast
2. Constantly agitate the wort by stirring and/or moving the IC around

The following brew day, I was ecstatic to reach 6°F above groundwater temperature in under 10 minutes! Times will vary depending on the type of IC you use and the temperature of your source water, but employing these 2 techniques will absolutely reduce your chill times. For users of CFCs, faster source water flow rates will improve your chilling efficiency as well.
"

 

[DarkVader2]

I boil with one gallon less water than the recipe calls for and then after I've cooled the wort down to 85 or 90 F, I add one gallon of 34 F distilled water to the wort. My water comes from a local water tower and is never very cool in the summer.

I know the purists don't like this idea, but it works for me.

 

[wolfie7873]

Where I live, using straight tap water for the immersion chiller source is a non-starter. Here in central North Carolina in July, my tap water is 83F. I bought a cheap submersible pump (like you might use in a desktop fountain, the retail for $19-ish at Lowe's). The pump goes in the ice water and supplies the immersion chiller with cold water. The first gallon through the chiller goes out into a bucket for watering plants, doing laundry, etc, and I refill with tap, at that point the water coming out of the chiller is cool enough i can just recirculate it through the ice bath. I can cool 3 gallons to lager pitch temp in 20 minutes.