I have beeen braistorming about a wort chiller. Let me give a bit of a background. I have a wort chiller that is limited to how cold it is outside. I live in Austin TX and it is usually fucking hot. The other day I brewed, and the temp outside was really chilly and it chilled my wort realy well. So I got to thinking about what if I put a spigot on my Kettle and run a copper tube through a container full of ice and run off to another container (Fermenter). Shouldn’t that chill it crazy quick? The only issue I can think of is the sanitization, but if you run some star san through it, that shouldn’t be a problem right? What are your thoughts?
Also I am a bit drunk off Dogfish Head’s Belgium Brown.
It’s sounds reasonable and easy but I don’t think they work well in reality unless you trickled the wort through at a pace that the exiting wort is at the temp you desire, which I’ll bet would be slow. You’d have to be impeccable in sanitation since every drop is going to touch the inside of that.
Not sure what your system is or how much you can spend, but I’d go with a pump and plate chiller and prechill the water with your ice bucket immersion chiller.
In the winter I use a bucket of ice to recirculate water through to chill, but my water is around 50F and the ice is abundant here in Northern IL in the winter (I just leave a couple half full 5 gallon buckets out over night). This way I don’t have frozen hoses and ice on the drive to my house. It might be expensive for you to use that much ice though…
I used to run the wort by gravity through a counter flow chiller and then through a length of copper pipe in an ice bath, then into the fermenters. It works especially well if you move the copper tubing around in the bath or install a pond pump to recirculate the ice water around.
It sounds like you are currently using an IC and stuck with incoming water sources that don’t get cold enough, I have the same issue here in the summer months.
You can make a second IC chiller, submerge this in a large vessel filled with ice, like a toy tub like thing with the IC in it. Run your source water through this IC to pre-chill and then over to the other IC you submerge in the wort and it works pretty effectively. Keep in mind you need at least 50’ of copper coil to get enough chill out of it.