As all of us have probably experienced at one time or another (especially in the summer), our ground water is too warm to adequately cool the wort to a proper pitching temperature.
Currently, I am using an immersion chiller to cool my wort and sometimes it takes ages to cool my wort with my ground water. Recently, I happened to be the lucky recipient of an extra immersion chiller (a brewing friend has left the hobby and donated some of his equipment). With that said I was wondering if I could “piggyback” the two immersion chillers and place one in ice and the other in my wort to see if my wort will cool down faster.
Does anybody utilize this practice? Has it worked?
The initial shock of heat would melt the ice water pretty fast. I think the way to go would be to chill the wort the best you can with ground water before bringing in the chiller with ice. I think it may help but would be much more effective if you were recirculating or using a counter flow chiller for chiller two.
I do a 2 stage chill. I have a 2 garbage pails (never use them for garbage) and I fill one with water from the tap. That’s my stage 1. A few days before brew day I make 4 blocks of ice. After my boil I take the pot off the burner and place it in the stage one pail with the hose still running slow to keep water movement. This seems to suck a lot of heat out of the pot. I do that for 10 minutes. During that 10 min I put the ice blocks into the second pail and add a little water. I bought a cheap, low volume flow pond pump that I place in the pail with the ice. This is stage 2. After 10 minutes in stage 1 I place the pot in stage 2. After 10 minutes in stage 2 I am down to the high 60 degree range and after 20 minutes the wort temp is usually in the high 50’s and I remove it. So I would have to say that the wort is in the hot zone for only about 15 minutes off the burner and I think that rivals any IC use.
^ This is correct. Your heat transfer is proportional to the temperature difference between the fluids, so while your initial heat transfer rate would be huge, as soon as the ice melted and the cooling water increased in temperature, your heat transfer would slow significantly.
It would be better to cool down from boiling to maybe 120-130 deg F with warm-ish tap water, and then drop the temperature of the cooling water by adding ice to the pre-chiller to quickly get down to pitching temperatures.
From the diagram it appears that only fresh, cool tap water is the feed water for the IC submerged in the ice water, with the hot waste water exiting from the IC submerged in wort going to the drain. Given enough ice I think this setup will work just fine.
Ken, I think you’re right, but if the ground water is so warm that it’s not cooling well I think you’d still be better off to hold back the ice until you knock down some of the temperature. Better yet, throw it in icy salt water.
Or just knock it down to reasonable temps (<100F) and place in a fridge overnight. Kinda chuckling as I type this as it is now in the 20s here and the concern now is not to inadvertently create a small ice skating rink…
knocking down with ground water until you hit 100df, then switching the water source to an ice water loop with a sump pump is hands down the quickest way to do it.
50’ 1/2" IC works best in this application.
i currently use a double ganged CFC (one with groundwater and one with an ice loop) and it can chill to below 50df basically as fast as you can pump wort. but I realize this setup is a lot more expensive than what I explained above.
another thing you could do is, assuming you got the IC squeaky clean inside, is to sanitize the second IC and actually run the wort through the IC in an bucket of ice water on its way to the fermentor. I did this for a while and it worked great as well. you can sanitize it by running the boiling wort through it (before placing in ice) 15 min before knockout.
We’re at a balmy 45* right now. Problem is, we had freezing rain yesterday, so when I go out to the garage, I’m dodging chunks of ice from 100’ up.
Got a saison chilling and a pork butt in the smoker, so it’s good.
From the diagram it appears that only fresh, cool tap water is the feed water for the IC submerged in the ice water, with the hot waste water exiting from the IC submerged in wort going to the drain. Given enough ice I think this setup will work just fine.[/quote]
Yep. And, one can always add more ice as it melts. One other thing, it’s not like boiling water is going through the precooling coil, it’s more likely to be around 50-70 degrees or so, so the ice isn’t going to be melting that quickly to begin with. It only takes a few degrees cooler water to make a big difference in how an immersion chiller works.
That just occurred to me, as this weekend will be my first time using the IC with the weather below freezing. Still not sure how I wanna handle that… the mailman is already mad enough at me for having huge mounds of landscape material in my driveway all fall long. Maybe I’ll try to get the utility sink hose hookup going this time around…
@mrv: 45F, brewing saison, and smoking pork butt sounds fabulous. Just got a propane smoker last weekend myself and basically ruined some chicken with too much wood (smoke). I researched everything to death except anything relating to how much wood.
@uberculture: I run off chiller into a large cooler with wheels and depending on the weather I either wheel it to the street into the storm sewer or just dump in the middle of the back yard. Cracking me up about the landscaping. The polar vortex killed most of mine and just redid it in Sept when it went on sale complete with 4 yards of mulch in driveway for week. Also, if you haven’t seen the thread, be sure and take that IC back in the house so it doesn’t freeze and break…
[quote=“zwiller”]@mrv: 45F, brewing saison, and smoking pork butt sounds fabulous. Just got a propane smoker last weekend myself and basically ruined some chicken with too much wood (smoke). I researched everything to death except anything relating to how much wood.
@uberculture: I run off chiller into a large cooler with wheels and depending on the weather I either wheel it to the street into the storm sewer or just dump in the middle of the back yard. Cracking me up about the landscaping. The polar vortex killed most of mine and just redid it in Sept when it went on sale complete with 4 yards of mulch in driveway for week. Also, if you haven’t seen the thread, be sure and take that IC back in the house so it doesn’t freeze and break…[/quote]
We filled in the pool. The week this fall we had a bobcat, we had about 50 yards delivered… Every time one pile went away, a dump truck brought in another.
[quote=“uberculture”][quote=“zwiller”]@mrv: 45F, brewing saison, and smoking pork butt sounds fabulous. Just got a propane smoker last weekend myself and basically ruined some chicken with too much wood (smoke). I researched everything to death except anything relating to how much wood.
@uberculture: I run off chiller into a large cooler with wheels and depending on the weather I either wheel it to the street into the storm sewer or just dump in the middle of the back yard. Cracking me up about the landscaping. The polar vortex killed most of mine and just redid it in Sept when it went on sale complete with 4 yards of mulch in driveway for week. Also, if you haven’t seen the thread, be sure and take that IC back in the house so it doesn’t freeze and break…[/quote]
We filled in the pool. The week this fall we had a bobcat, we had about 50 yards delivered… Every time one pile went away, a dump truck brought in another.[/quote]
Plumb the pre-chiller so that water bypasses it until the wort gets as cold as its going to get, then close the bypass so that th pre-chiller finishes the job.
I have used basically the same method as your diagram using an immersion chiller in one of those plastic storage bins filled with water to feed my counter flow chiller. I freeze plastic 2 liter soda bottles and also use the blue ice things. In summer the ground water isn’t that warm, maybe seventies tops and it still burns through the bottles of ice in a hurry. For two ICs the plumbing bypass sounds like a great idea to me.
This prechiller system works for me. I bypass the prechiller until the wort has been cooled significantly by tap water, then turn the water off long enough to attach the the hoses to the prechiller that is sitting in an old fermenter bucket with ice water. Its not perfect, but it sure helps finish the cool down during the warm months when the Lake Erie water is warm. During the summer I have 65 degree cold water so prechilling cuts the cool down time considerably.
I’ve been using a short pre-chiller 60 inches of SS tube in a five gallon bucket with a small bag of ice and enough water to cover the ice. It then hooks direct to my wort chiller. I start out with a fairly high water flow then start slowing the flow as the wort gets down under 90*. This gives the incoming water time to cool in the pre-chiller. You can feel the temp changes as you slow the flow. This gets me chilled wort in 10 minutes. In August in St Louis.
