Folks who use an immersion chiller… how do you seal the kettle?
Just wondering what others do?
thanks in adavance
Haeffnkr
I have no lid when I use my chiller. I have “the hydra” chiller from jaded brewing and it rocks! I usually can get my wort down to temp in less than 10 minutes. So, I don’t worry about a lid.
I lay an old pizza pan across the top of the kettle and chiller. Doesn’t seal it but it keeps stuff from getting in.
I either use pieces of sanitized aluminum foil across the top or I use the lid like Denny’s pizza pan. Not sealed, but covering everything.
I have no lid when I chill, but I brew indoors so that doesn’t bother me.
I use no lid. I figure it will cool faster without one.
I also use no lid. I boil outdoors but chill in the basement so I don’t worry about it too much.
Paul
No lid while chilling, but do cover when settling out after chilling. Still have the IC running, so the cover is not a good seal. Just helps keep crap out of the BK. Never had a problem.
Most of the time I use no lid, I like to stir to get the wort to cool faster. If I’m not stirring I’ll just lay the lid half ass on top of the chiller and kettle.
I use my regular lid and don’t worry about a seal.
I use an old lid with holes cut to pass the chiller standpipes.
Back in the day when I used an immersion chiller, I also used no lid. The reason for this was that you have to keep moving the chiller around in the wort to get efficient cooling. If you leave the chiller in one place you get a kind of insulating layer around the chiller of cooler wort while the wort outside the chiller stays at a higher temperature. That said, you could use what others have suggested and just remove the lid when you need to agitate the chiller in the hot wort.
I never had a problem with nasties getting into the wort without using a lid and I used to brew in my barn before I built an indoor brewery in my house. Got tired of hauling water 300 feet to the barn and wort the same distance back to my house and trying to clean equipment with ice cold water in the winter. Did that for about 6 years!
One of the several things I learned from the “Whirlpool Techniques” session that I introduced at HomebrewCon 2018, was that you have no chance of infection when the wort temperature is above 140F and falling. Therefore, its only the late stage of your chilling that you need to maybe worry.
By the way, you should check out this session since it did have some interesting info.
A small German brewery we toured uses a cool ship (Kühlschiff). Among the reasons were volatiles out gassing, letting true settle, and of course cooling. He said he would run the wort though the chiller when it got down close to 60C, which is 140F.
I use no lid, have a big copper wort chiller, and I brew outside. It takes longer in the summer to chill my wort but if I shake and use my chiller to create a whirlpool it takes less time. About 20 minutes.
Only time I put a lid on is when it started raining, and then hailing on me.
I looked and couldn’t find the presentations from this session available online yet. If you have a link, please share it.
I am struggling with a trade-off between chilling and settling. If I let the wort sit perfectly still I see large “trees” of break material that settle down fairly rapidly, but my chiller performs poorly and it takes a long time and uses a lot of water (important in California). If I establish a vigorous whirlpool I find that my chiller is more effective and I cool the wort much faster but the “trees” get shredded into small pieces of “mulch” which get uniformly distributed and settle more slowly. I don’t see all the break material in a cone in the middle of my kettle.
I am considering some kind of hybrid approach: whirlpooling through any hop stands at the start of cooldown, then using minimal stirring after that to just keep the boundary layers off the wort chiller.
I am also wondering if I paid the big bucks for a fancier chiller if I could cool more quickly with less wort motion and get the best of both worlds. I just don’t know if fast chilling is more important than having larger break particles that settle better.
It sounds like you are concerned about getting break material into your fermentor. Don’t be. Having some break material transferred over to your fermentor has been shown to be beneficial to fermentation. It’s really not a big deal, at least in my experience.
I highly recommend the Jaded Hydra chiller with their whirlpool arm.
Nor mine.
I don’t mind “some” break material, but how much is too much? I generally get some when I first open my valve to drain the kettle, then the dip tube drills a hole in the break material and the wort runs clear until I get near the bottom of the kettle. I could continue to get another 1/2 gallon or so of cloudy wort but that seems like too much to me.