Home Distiller

Hi All!

Any opinions on the best wort chiller for the home brewer?

Thanks!

I gots all sorts of opinions!

Here's my best suggestion if you like to tinker. Build (or buy) a hybrid counterflow/immersion recirculating chiller. Let me explain my reasoning.

First, the definitions: An immersion chiller is the kind that you place in the wort and run cold water through the coils to cool your wort. Many people will say they prefer a counterflow chiller because it allows precise control of output temperature. My opinion is that the main problem with them is they don't cool the whole entire wort at once. They only cool a small portion at a time. The reason this matters is if you are doing late hop additions, like at 5 mins or flameout, the hops will continue to sit in the hot wort and isomerize, meaning they will lose a lot of aroma. This doesn't matter of course if your latest hop additions are at least 20 mins before end of boil. But for IPAs and Pale Ales (and some other styles) it is imperative.

The biggest problem, however, with immersion chillers is that in order to get the maximum cooling efficiency you have to keep the wort recirculating around the coils or you will get thermal channeling. Basically thermal channeling means that you will get a thin blanket of cold wort surrounding the coils, but no heat transfer. In order to remedy this you either have to manually move the coils up and down, or you employ a method that Jamil Zainasheff invented(or at least is credited for), the recirculating chiller. This is not as complicated as it sounds.

All you have is a standard immersion chiller, but instead of having to manually move the coils through the wort, you get the wort to move past the coils. The thing is that you need an output at the bottom of your kettle for wort to come out. This gets pumped back to the top of the kettle (through use of a March pump or some other food-grade pump) and dumped back inside the coils of the chiller, at an angle that will cause turbulent flow. This improves the rate of cooling dramatically. Plus, as an added benefit, it causes the chiller itself to become a trap for the hop material, essentially making it a filter as well.

Finally, an improvement on this method is to use a counterflow chiller in-line with the recirculating chiller. This will cool the recirculating wort even further. The cooling water would start going into the immersion chiller, come out of the immersion chiller, into the bottom of the CFC, out the top, and then into your washing machine or something else that requires hot water (like sanitizing solution). You can cut down on cooling water used and lower the time that it takes to cool your wort!

This is my suggestion to anyone who has the time... But this may be overkill. I don't know, I kinda like overkill...

A brazed plate heat exchanger is sounding like a pretty simple "cure" right about now. Just return the wort via a mulitholed vertical pipe to reduce stratification of the liquid.... simple stainless mesh ball type screen to keep the ingredients in their place and not in the pipes or HX. Two small pumps and you're off. Drop the temps in no time at all. Could even cut off the pumps via an aquastat when desired temp is hit. All these guys making brazed plate exchanges will make a two or three plate design. Depends how fast you want to drop the temp.

FYI- I move everything I make with dishwasher pumps they'll even handle mashed up solids to a degree and don't mind the heat.

I'm just thinking out loud... I haven't brewed beer in ... a long time.

I have a plate chiller and here are a few observations on it.

1. If you have lots of sediment in your wort, i.e. sediment from hop pellets, it will clog up the plate chiller fast. (I use whole hops in bags to avoid this.)

2. If you have cold ground water out of the tap, it makes plate chillers a lot more efficient. Where I live, in the summer, ground water is above 70F and the plate chiller doesn't work great. I have to add a coil of hose to the set-up before it gets into the plate chiller and add ice water around the hose to cool the tap water.

3. As an addition to the last statement, to make plate chillers more effective, either submerse the whole chiller in icewater or submerse your water-in line coiled up in a bucket of ice water to prechill the cooling water (or both.)

~bd~