Copper vs Stainless Steel Wort Chiller

My personal opinion is that stainless is the way to go. It's easier to clean and it will work well enough. Furthermore it helps you keep copper out of your beer if that's something you decide is important to you - copper accelerates staling according to LoDo (low dissolved oxygen) doctrine.

Edit - I suppose I should add that I personally don't find avoiding copper to be a very compelling concern in terms of staling, since yeast gobble it up and leave essentially none in the beer. But steel still has the advantage of being easy to clean, and it works fine.

 

I switched to stainless to avoid loading my beer up with Cu, and I did notice it was a bit slower. It is way easier to clean though, and pretty minimal difference in overall chilling time.

I think you should seriously consider looking for a 50ft coil in whatever material you choose, and make sure it's 1/2"

 

25ft of copper isn't worth it, you'll end up looking for something longer soon enough. I have a 25ft one that I use as a pre-chiller, though.

 

Do you have a link (or reference) to a technical paper which quantifies yeast "gobbling" of copper?

Cheers!

 

Going to a 50 foot length is more critical than stainless or copper. I agree, don't both with a 25 foot chiller for use as a primary chiller.

 

It depends on your water temperature. Our well water is 44F year-round and 25ft of copper works fine. Flameout to 60F in 20 minutes with vigorous stirring, 30 if I'm lazy, for a 10 gallon batch (I mostly brew in colder weather which probably helps too).

 

Yeast do require some copper to function. I remember reading somewhere that English brewers saw terrible fermentations when they switched to stainless kettles from the traditional copper. They figured out that some copper was required and dealt with it by throwing a couple of pennies (pence?) in the boil. Problem solved. Later, kettles had a small copper bar attached to the inside for the same reason. Don't know if this is still true; most probably just use yeast nutrients now.

 

I've read this several places over the years, but the specific paper I was thinking of can be found at the following link:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2050-0416.2008.tb00318.x

I was misremembering a bit - iron is actually the metal that is pretty much entirely scrubbed during fermentation, while copper is mostly removed during the boil. However, even when copper is added to cold wort, a large fraction is removed during fermentation. As a result neither copper nor iron has a noticeable staling effect on the beer (at least in the quantities tested), while manganese (which is not removed as effectively as the other metals) does tend to stale the beer.

 

Lucky for you to have that water temperature @ 44F year round! In winter a 25 ft chiller would work for me but not in summer as my inlet water increases significantly.

 

Yes, I feel lucky in many ways to live where I do. The water is soft as well. However its temperature is due to the fact that it is damn cold here for 4-5 months a year and chilly for another 2-3. My attitude is that a couple weeks of 30 below every winter helps keep the riff-raff from moving in; unfortunately it has been several years since we had a good cold spell...

 

I did conduct a web search while awaiting your reply and I did find the document you linked. From that article (with emphasis in bold by me):

“For copper, a reduction of concentration was observed during wort boiling and wort treatment, as well as during fermentation. Only copper addition to the cold wort led to a slightly higher content in the final beer.”

It would seem to me that using a copper wort chiller would equate to “copper addition to the cold wort”.

Is there data in that article that quantifies copper ion reduction by yeast during fermentation? I personally missed that detail (if it was present).

Cheers!

 

"An addition of 100 ppb of copper to cold wort increased the final beer content only by a quarter of the added amount."

The paper notes that "copper content was mainly reduced during wort boiling and trub removal." It seems to me that using a copper wort chiller is somewhere in between adding copper to the boil and adding it to cold wort.

Anyway, just to reiterate, I don't actually recommend using a copper wort chiller. I recommend stainless steel. But I'm not convinced that copper wort chillers cause beer staling.

 

Fair enough.

Cheers!

 

I think he intended to say yeast is "gobbling up oxygen".

 

My spring stays cold like @skivtjerry and I switched to stainless years ago. No issues cooling quickly and I do stir with the immersion chiller. Even with a 8 gallon batch it's fast enough and cleanup is a breeze.

 

Per this paper:
https://www.agraria.com.br/extranet...lidade_do_flavor_da_cerveja_1601495755697.pdf

"The rate of flavor staling in beer is significantly increased by traces of Cu(II), even at levels below 100 μg/L"

That's 100 micrograms per liter, or about 100 parts per billion. The question is how much copper does a wort chiller contribute, in addition to whatever is ultimately contributed by the ~0.7 mg/kg copper in barley malt?

 

One thing I think we can agree on is that a stainless steel wort chiller contributes no copper to the beer.

If the batch of beer is consumed quickly perhaps the aspect of copper exacerbating beer staling is of lesser concern.

Cheers!

 

I was always pretty concerned when I stuck my 50 ft 1/2' copper chiller into my beer that was fully covered in greenish brown copper oxide, and then pulled it out sparkling clean.

Seems like a pretty significant amount of copper to me, but then again, people have been and continue to make great beer will copper chillers !

 

It's kind of cool that the Labatt brewing research department, which employed the authors of this paper, is located on Simcoe Street in London, Ontario. I wonder if that's where they got the name for the hop variety.