I currently have a two-stage wort chiller system. the coil that goes in my kettle and a smaller first stage that i put in an ice chest. It’s great at getting down quickly to 90 but then as most people experience it is slow, even with ice to get down to 70. Plus it wastes a lot of water. Do you all have a go-to option that both gets the wort down fast and faster 70 but also eliminates wasting water as much as my system does? I know I am at the mercy of the water temp of my tap and I could use ice to compensate. Is CounterFlow or Plate better? What is best? Thanks all, I want to save time and also be a good Californian and not waste so much water.
You could use a submersible pump to recirculate ice water through your chiller once you get down to 100 degrees or so.
Personally, I just chill to 80 or 90, put the fermentor in the chest freezer, and pitch yeast the following morning (I only brew at night).
+1, but I’ll check on it before hitting the hay and pitch if possible.
so the suggestion would be that my setup shouldn’t change much, just rely on my keezer to chill down further and maybe one change would be getting a pump to pump the ice water through the chiller faster.
If you are concerned about wasting water, fill buckets and use elsewhere.
That is the thing, there isn’t much for us to water, we live in an apartment complex with very little greenspace.
What I do. Though I think I may add a King Cobra chiller to the mix (hopefully) over the holiday season.
You don’t have your own washing machine? That’s where all of my water goes.
Use 4 L of frozen water in soda bottles to drop down the last 20 degrees. This step will take a few hours.
I let my fermentation chamber do the heavy lifting as well, chill through my CFC as far as it will go and then the chamber until it reaches pitch temp
A pair of 20’ to 25’ counter flow chillers in series will usually drop wort to lager pitching temp if one runs tap water through the first stage and ice water through the second stage.
this is what I do - and i run off into my kettle, easily, at <50df.
Even in the heat of summer? Where do you live Alaska?
I’m in the 25’ chiller club. In the summer here, I have gotten used to chilling to around 80° and then putting into the chest freezer to finish chilling to pitch temp. I spen most of my chilling time stirring the pot, but still takes 30 minutes or more to get to that 80°, so I am interested in the King Cobra chiller which should speed things up. Birthday gift to myself next month? Sounds great
That King Cobra looks great and has good reviews, but it still can only go as low as your ground water (unless you run a pre-chiller on it I guess). But saving some time is always worth money.
assuming directed at me - no, i live in the opposite - south florida.
the first CFC with 75-80df groundwater knocks the wort to 90-100df approx, the second one, being fed with 36-40df ice water loop knocks it down below 50, lower dependent on how much i restrict the wort flow with a ball valve.
In the heat of summer, for a lager, i’ll need 30-40# of ice, 20-30# for an ale. During the winter 10-20# less respectively.
btw as another poster mentioned, the same effect can be achieved with an IC by using hosewater to knock down to ~100df and then switching from the hose to a sump pump recirculating a loop of ice water until it hits your desired pitching temp.
Yes, I’m also in Florida and I chill the kettle with ground water to less than 100 first. It depends on the time I have - sometimes I can get it to 85. Then I switch to recirculating ice water, but I usually just run the chilled wort straight into the fermenters instead of trying to cool the whole kettle. One 20# bag does 10 gallons down to the upper 50’s for me.
+2
Ice is amazing stuff. It takes ~80 calories of heat to convert 1 gram of ice at 32F to 1 gram of water at 32F whereas it only takes 1 calorie of heat to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. This amount of energy is known as the latent heat of fusion for water. What latent heat of fusion for water means in layman’s terms is that 1 gram of ice can sink 80 degrees Celsius from 1 gram of wort during the phase change from ice to water. A 5-gallon batch of 1.060 wort water weighs approximately 48lbs; hence, 48lbs of ice will drop 5 gallons of 1.060 wort from boiling to 20C (68F) during the phase change from ice to water, and that is before the wort and the melted ice water reach equilibrium (i.e., equalize in temperature). Forty-eight pounds of ice is roughly 5.75 U.S. gallons of water. If the wort is dropped from boiling to 20C during the phase change from ice at 32F to water at 32F, then we have 5.75 gallons of 32F cooling water and 5 gallons of wort at 68F before the liquids reach equilibrium, and 5.75 * 32 + 5 * 68 / 10.75 = 49F wort after the liquids reach equilibrium. Granted, this scenario is for a 100% efficient heat exchange system, but it does illustrate the power of ice when it comes to cooling.