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Cooking and Chilling the wort

Northern Brewer General
#1

Looking forward to getting home to South Carolina in September and starting my first homebrew.

I haven’t purchased a seperate burner, I plan to use the side burner on my grill and I wonder if this will be adequate to cook 2.5 - 3 gallons at a time.

I purchased an immersion chiller, but I’ve been looking at the ChillZilla. My Bayou Classic 8-Gallon Stainless Steel Stockpot has a spigot on it and I was wondering if I could just attach the chillzilla directly to it or if it would need to be isolated by a short piece of hose. I’m thinking I’d cut off the heat, screw on the chillzilla, attach the water hoses, turn the water on and get it flowing, open the valve on the pot and let the wort flow through a hose into a primary fermentation carboy. Perhaps I could use the immersion chiller with a bucket of ice to prechill the cooling water.

Thanks.

#2

Do you know what the side burner on your grill is rated at? If it has enough BTU output, what you are proposing should work. Not sure what your water supply temps are, but the ice water prechiller works well but can be complicated to set up. Another option is to immerse the primary full of wort in a bucket of ice water for 10-15 minutes, or if you are doing a concentrated wort boil, topping up with water that has been in a cold fridge overnight will also help you get the rest of the way to pitching temps. Also make sure you keep the fermenting wort cool, down in the mid 60s or cooler works nicely.

#3

A concern I’d have is for the weight capacity of the side burner. You’re going to have 3 gallons of beer, along with the pot on that side burner, would weigh about 30 pounds? Wouldn’t want the whole thing to tip over.

Maybe that isn’t a big deal. My first impression is that the side burner is mainly there for frypans and stuff like that, not made for big pots. There’s one way to find out!!!

#4

unless you have a real heavy duty, commercial sort of grill with at side burner, it is doubtful that you will have any chance of enough heat. Most of these are very light duty

#5

I may need to consider purchasing a burner.

So, any thoughts on using the chillzilla as I described? Directly connecting to the brewpot valve?

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