I am looking to make a counterflow wort chiller and I was looking to use copper for it or should I use stainless tube? Does the copper affect the beer? How many feet of tube should I use?
Yup copper. I went with 50’ of 1/2" copper tubing. Wrapped it around a cornie keg but the top coils usually stick out of the top of the wort. In retrospect I’d use something wider like a bucket.
They are super efficient (in the Winter I need to turn down the water flow), compact and easy to sterilize in the oven. After I use it I backflush with the garden hose. I clean my pump and hoses after every brew anyway and just add the chiller into the loop. I pump hot PBW through it for 30 minutes and you’re done.
A lot of trappist breweries use copper kettles and mash tun’s. I guess they could be lined with something on the inside to seperate the beer from the copper. Would be interesting to find out.
I did the same thing thinking that I might one day want to be able to immerse it in a smaller stock pot (like my 5.5 gallon SS kettle) or in a Homer Bucket (and use it like a prechiller). Haven’t done either. Nonetheless, it stores easily around a corny keg, which keeps it from getting bent or damaged.
It still cools it down pretty good. Not so much now since the ambient temps are 85+ during the day in Summer.
Soft copper refrigerator coil is incredibly easy to bend around a corny keg or equivalent using a cheap spring-type pipe bending kit. Copper also adds necessary trace nutrients to the beer which aids yeast nutrition. It’s also very easy to sanitize/sterilize, since you can just fill the copper coil with water and dump it into your wort kettle for the last 20-30 minutes of the boil. Just be careful to catch the boiling water that spits out the ends!
If you’re worried about tarnish on the copper, just put it in a boiling pot of slightly acidic water for 15-30 minutes, then carefully rinse and dry it afterwards.
Finally, if you want to upgrade to a counterflow chiller, it’s easy to incorporate your copper tubing into the new project.
Back on topic lo. II am making a counter flow chiller. Sso my question is this I am using like 50 feet of 3/8 soft copper inside a garden hose and such. My kettle has a torpedo tube and I put the hops right into thh kettle wlll have to woory about hop sediment clogging the tube?
I have a Bazooka screen along the inside of my kettle (along the side, not into the middle). After the boil I’ll stir the hot wort into a whirlpool and let the trub settle in the center for at least 15 minutes. So far I haven’t had any problems with clogging.