Just curious if anyone else has done this. To be honest, this piece of equipment originated by my misunderstanding of the immersion chiller. I run the water hose in the barrel and run the hot wort through the copper. It’s extremely efficient. During the winter, i just fill the barrel w/ water and keep it cold by shoveling snow into it. When cleaning my keggles prior to brewing, I always hook them up to this and runoff all the cleaning fluid through the tubing. Never had an issue w/ infection and I’ve been using this for years now. It works great, but curious if anyone else does this. I’ll be upgrading to a plate chiller soon, but only because it takes up a lot less space.
yeah - what it sounds like is basically a CFC (Counterflow Chiller) - morebeer sells one called the Chillzilla.
this is similar to a cross flow heat exchanger with no flow on the shell side. i have something similar i am working on with my coil in a 2 gallon bucket and then i have hose taps in the lid and shell of the bucket to pump ice water through it.
That’s funny, when I started brewing going on 17 years now I misunderstood and did the exact same thing. I think you will find the regular Immersion Chiller set up to be just as efficient and way more easy to use. To sanitize an IC you just hose it off and dump it in the boil during the last minute and whirl pool with a spoon or pump while chilling. I have a counter flow chiller as well and both work great but I always preferred the convenience of the IC, personally.
Me too. I learned from a friend who forgot how it was supposed to work.
BTW: I drop mine in the last 20 minutes to sanitize. Some how I missed typing that above.
I have a jamil-o-chiller and pump. I put the chiller in for the last 15min to sanitize. I also run the pump and have the wort recirculate to sanitze the pump and hoses. Is this your process?
Yes. That’s what I did, anyway, until my IC got damaged. I actually use a chillzilla CFC now because I have one, but I do recirc that the 20 min of boil with pump ala the JZ way. Works just the same, except I always PBW the CFC after every brew session. Rarely did anything with IC except hose it off, though I did do an acid soak a few times to remove patina from copper.