Ice Blanket to Help Chill Wort?

IMO ... there's probably little benefit by bung-ifying a kettle with curvaceous ice packs.

Instead ... treat your kettle's dermis to the delights of a cold water sponge bath (or spraying w/cold water) and enjoy all the benefits of accelerated wort chillin.'

 

http://www.brewgadgets.com/p-1266-c...6NwW-0pUn64SNQNeqL_KMtA48owRf5Rmf-hoCtUbw_wcB


Welcome to the obsession.

 

He's got an immersion chiller. What some people find is that their tap water is too warm to get their beer down to appropriate temperatures in a reasonable amount of time. Also, in California, water is pretty scarce these days, and it must seem terribly wasteful to use gallons and gallons of it as a mere heat sink. (I presume you could capture the water in a bathtub or something and use it to water plants or whatever.)

So anyway, @Dschiller, what some people do is get a small pump and circulate icewater through the immersion chiller. This has the advantage that you use less water and you can get the wort down to pitching temperature reasonably quickly. However, note: it's probably a waste to use icewater until the wort is down to 100°F or so, because tapwater does a reasonably good job up to that point. So if I lived in California, I would (A) use tapwater for a while, trying to recapture it in some way, and then (B) switch over to a pump pushing icewater through the immersion chiller once my wort was down to about 100°F. It will take a reasonably large amount of ice, this isn't "dump a few icecube trays into the sink," it's more "buy 5 or 10 lbs of ice at the store."

Or I could be making wrong assumptions about your whole situation, but since you already have an immersion chiller, it seems as though something isn't working for you.

 

the solution is obvious. you need a bigger sink.
you will convince yourself eventually. just a heads up.
Cheers.

 

I shouldn't post after two barleywines. Thanks for the catch.

@Dschiller Maybe a counterflow or chill plate with lots of ice in the process would work best. Try to get the wort down as low as you can. You can throw a beer in a fermentation chiller (extra fridge) at 80F and bring it down to pitching temp.

 

go buy a cheap pond pump and cycle ice water through that into your immersion chiller

 

Kinda sad but nevertheless ... quite true.

 

I would let the outlet go back into the ice bath. By the time the wort is at or below 100°F, the water is still pretty cold even after it's gone through the immersion chiller. Probably colder than your tap water, to be honest.

 

This ^^ Buddy lets the first 30 seconds to a minute of runnings go into the drain then lets the remainder go into the ice bath to recirculate and save water .

 

But now he's cured!

 

I run 2 immersion chillers linked together with a short hose running between them with one as a pre-chiller sitting in a bucket of ice. I can usually get my wort down to pitching temp really fast.

 

On Monday I did a 3 gallon batch in my smaller kettle, which I carried downstairs and put into the utility sink on the basement (which has a garden-hose fitting that I can hook my chiller up to). After a few minutes of chilling, I started directing the water leaving the chiller onto the outside of the kettle and that, combined with the smaller batch size and cold ground water you get in January in Montreal, had my wort down to 65F in no time. It was great! Makes me wish I could do the same thing with my larger kettle, but hauling 5 gallons of boiling liquid down the stairs to the basement doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

Not quite sure what I would do in the summertime to get the temp below 80F or so, though. I could make an ice bath in a kiddie pool and run the hose through that before it hits the chiller, I guess. What about using my fermentation chamber to bring the temperature down before pitching, is there any reason not to do it that way? Would there be a problem with leaving the wort to cool overnight and pitching in the morning, once it has reached fermentation temp?

 

Right you are that it would be a bad idea to introduce a flight of stairs to sub boiling wort. You may consider a longer hose, but by then you may as well get the kiddie pool and ice going through a pond/sump pump. I have a lot of luck with a 4 or 5 gal Tupperware tote chocked full of ice water. I break the initial temp with tap water and save the ice for the last little bit. Once I'm down around 100F (38C) I switch my line over to the sump pump full of ice water.

Leaving the wort uninoculated isn't ideal, but it would work. Any time the wort isn't above 160F (71C) you are at risk of bugs getting into your beer. Anything you can do to get the yeast a head start on the sugars the better. When life gets in the way, you still generally make great beer. RDWHAHB.

 

Thanks for the suggestions, inchrisin. I have tons of hose, about 50' worth, so I can run the chiller in the kitchen by either hooking it up to my outside faucet (summer) or running hose up from the basement (winter, but what a pain). I was more talking about being to direct the water exiting the chiller onto the outside of my kettle, thereby getting even more cooling from it. I can do that with my 5G kettle in the basement sink, since I know I can handle carrying 3G of boiling wort, but for now I can't think of a good way to get that extra cooling when I'm making a 5G batch in my 10G kettle.

As for pitching late, I see what you mean. Rather than do that, I'll probably look into making a cold water bath for the chiller hose once the temperatures rise. And in the meantime, my ground water is so cold that I could probably chill even a 5G batch down to about 70F in short order using my chiller without any extra help.