Jaded Hydra

Son and I were looking at our process and identified chilling as a huge timesuck. We decided on a Jaded Hydra vs. a plate chiller. Maiden voyage last night - Wow! Boiling to pitch in about 10 minutes for a 5 gallon batch.

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That is heck of a pile of copper! Sneezles61

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It was (pardon my words) so COOL to chill the wort in that quickly. Saved some well water and saved some time. I’ve noticed improved chilling with our original Silver Serpent if we move the kettle off the burner which we didn’t do yesterday. I may brew again today since bow season opens Sunday. I’ll move the kettle off the burner and see how it does on a 10 gallon batch.

:nerd:

[quote=“WMNoob, post:3, topic:25024, full:true”]
I’ll move the kettle off the burner and see how it does on a 10 gallon batch. [/quote]

Make sure you have help! That’s an awful lot of weight and boiling hot wort!

That’s a great reminder, thanks for the caution! On second thought, maybe I won’t move it.

:+1:

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Never gave a thought to moving the kettle. Not practical with my 20 gallons but I’m wondering if a small fan under the burner to help cool off the stand might help. With the tap water being somewhat warmer this summer I have been running an IC in the kettle first then running the wort through my CF. Anything to help speed it up and cool it more is good.

Might be time for me to change my wort chilling method and build a immersion chiller. My boil kettle is upstairs and everything else beer related is downstairs. It isn’t too much of a safety problem carrying the kettle downstairs with two hands after it is cooled. With a good carrier I should be able to handle hot wort. Sort of moving it down one step at a time with my least damaged arm.

My ground water temp is 75ish so my wort comes down quickly with normal IC to 80’s within 10 mins with stirring. Trouble is getting it below to pitch it. I’ve been putting kettle into swamp cooler with ice bottles until it gets into the lower 60’s then adding top up water and pitching. Winter brewing is so nice when my ground water is in 40/50s

Consider using a prechiller. For better efficiency bypass the prechiller until your worts around 100° then run it through the prechiller to get down to your 60° pitch temps.

You could set up a CFC and using gravity, get it down stairs without lifting! I may have another gizmo to swap down the line when I build a parallel CFC… :wink: Sneezles61

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That’s a sweet looking, if pricey, IC.

We use a pump to push tap water through the IC from a bucket. Once we get to about 100F we dump ice into the bucket. Conceptually it’s exactly like @loopie_beer’s prechiller suggestion.

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