Counterflow Coil vs. Plate Chiller

I have never used a counterflow coil chiller (like the Chillzilla), so I can't directly compare. I do own the Blichmann Therminator. Just bought it a few months ago. My initial grade on it is an A. It's very easy to use, small, portable, and most importantly, it works great. I just hook it up with cold tap water running and I get 68F wort output instantly. In total, it takes all of 5 minutes to chill a 3 gallon batch (my typical batch size) to pitching temp. If you get the Therminator, I would highly recommend getting the Thrumometer too, which reads the wort output temp and saves you a step doing it yourself. The only downside is the cleaning aspect, but I don't find it too big of a deal. Immediately when you're done chilling, you backflush it with water for several minutes. You'll need to buy a backflush assembly or make one yourself, which is what I did and saved me a few bucks. I then soak it in PBW for 30 min and flush it again. Then I let it soak for a few minutes in sanitizer (I use One Step, Blichmann advises against acid based sanitizers) and let it drip dry. I was concerned initially that it seemed to retain some liquid in it after all this, but it is just sanitizer and it doesn't harm anything. So there are a few steps to cleaning it, but they're really not labor intensive by any means. It's more effort cleaning out a carboy, really. Hope that info helps some. Cheers!

 

The Therminator is really easy to clean. Get an aquarium pump, submerse it in a bucket of oxyclean and hook up to Therminator. Run in a loop (Pump to Therminator to oxyclean bucket) for 30 minutes, then put pump into bucket with water, run it for 5 minutes, then move pump to bucket of iodophor and run for 5 minutes. Clean and sanitized.

Before I use my pump on brew day I'll run iodophor through it and all my March pump lines that aren't used for whirlpooling to ensure their sanitary, then hook up and run. Then repeat cleaning procedure.

The plate chillers get a bad wrap from people who don't clean them properly or clean them quickly after brew day.

Since switching to a plate I won't go back to immersion, although the only real benefit I've seen for immersion is that you can use it to bring wort temp below 210 F quickly to do a hop stand at say 170 F, but then again with the plate chiller you can set up an inline hop back to filter your wort and give it some extra punch.

 

how do you guys (therminator users) handle kettle trub? I know there are 122389792731 ways to combat this when using the product, but in your experience, which works best, or which method do you have no issues doing?

 

basic whirlpool for most of my beers. If I'm brewing a beer with loads of hops, I will use a hopblocker/stopper as well. Some people use stainless steel scrubbies, others use a grant or a blichmann hop rocket. Many ways to skin a cat...

 

to the OP, I had a 50' cfc for years with 3/8" copper coil and now have upgraded to a plate chiller. Pros for the plate chiller is it can chill the wort faster, but found that ultimately my cfc was a more efficient system. Pros for the cfc was that when my tap water was really cold, I could get the chilling water coming out of the chiller at scalding temperatures and which was perfect for cleaning the system with Oxyclean/PBW. The water that comes out of my 30 plate chiller is definitely not that hot. Another pro for the plate chiller is it has small footprint on my brewstand...and have been able to pimp out the plate chiller so it has more of the wow factor if that means anything since I added inline oxygenation system with sight glass.

 

Whirlpool helps settle trub and then a hop rocket will filter out an trub that makes it through. For non-hoppy beers, I just fill the hop rocket with bagged rice hulls.

 

I use a HopBlocker with it, regardless of whether it's a DIPA or a hefe. You'll still get a little bit of hop debris and trub in the chiller, but it's flushes out with the backflush.

 

Buy a section of 1/2" copper tubing and a tubing bender and make a whirlpool arm attached to your immersion chiller to pump your wort back into the kettle with the pump you'd have to buy anyways to use a counterflow chiller properly. Immersion chilling isn't actually slower than counterflow chilling; its just that most people don't want to invest the time to continually agitate the wort to keep the hot liquid moving across the hot coils. In fact, many would say its even more desirable to chill all of your wort at once.

 

thanks for the replies dudes.

 

My experience with both is that the plate is around 10 times faster for a 5 gallon batch. Even with a whirlpool attachment to my immersion chiller, it still takes 40-50 minutes to reach pitching temps, whereas with a plate chiller its about 4 minutes start to finish. This differential increases hugely when I go from 5 gallon batches to the 20 gallon batches I use for barrel filling or brewing for events.

Yes you are still limited in temperature by the delta T of the cooling water and wort temp, but with the massive surface area of the plate chillers, its been night and day for me.

 

I don't have a pump and my counterflow chiller works great. Takes about 15 minutes for my wort to flow through my spigot on my pot, through the chiller, and into the carboy, the temp is right around what the tap water temp is. This is much quicker than when I was using (and agitiating) an immersion chiller. Plus I don't have to babysit it, I can begin cleaning.

 

I have both (counterflow and immersion). It takes ~ the same time (30 min) to chill 10 gals to 68*F using both methods simultaneously or 5 gals to 68*F using just the immersion chiller...problem is that I'll need it ~55*F when I brew 10 gals of lagers regularly...hope an additional pre-chiller with crushed ice will work to get it down to 55*F

 

It doesn't take 40-50 minutes for me to get to pitching temps on a 5 gallon batch even just falling back on intermittent stirring. Not sure how you're getting that kind of chilling time.

Moreover, the surface area of a plate chiller and a good sized immersion chiller is actually pretty similar.

From Jamil Zainasheff:

My personal experience is that pre-chillers are a waste of money vs. just buying a submersible garden pump and putting the ice water through the chiller itself because cheap pond pumps cost less than pre-chillers.

 

I already have a pre-chiller (my old immersion chiller from 5 gal batches)...come to think of it, I have 2 or 3 old pond pumps that still work also : )

 

It is what it is. I can chill faster with ice water, but it still takes 20 minutes to chill to pitching temps.

My point was that agitation via stirring or whirlpooling, while it did cut time relative to no stirring/ whirlpooling and chilling with an immersion, still didn't make my immersion batches chill as fast as with my plate chiller.

Not everyones set up is the same nor are their experiences with the same pieces of equipment; just providing another example set of experiences with both sets of equipment.

 

Surface area is not the deciding factor in plate chiller vs. immersion chiller argument, that comparison can be made with plate chiller vs. cfc because they are using the same dynamic to chill. The flaw in Jamil's argument is that there are two different systems at work here and the variable is the delta T, or temp difference. Immersion chillers work great when the wort is at 190F, but then become less & less efficient as the delta T become closer to 0. Plate chillers & cfc maintain a nearly constant delta T.
Don't get me wrong, I think immersion chillers with whirlpool arms are great and if you want to get geeky, you can get a thermometer on the outflowing chilling water to make sure that it is right about wort temp, then you can keep slowing the flow down so that you're not wasting water...but that isn't saving you time. Obviously ice baths are the way to speed that process up. Me personally, I don't want to bother with ice baths an am lucky to have cold tap water. I've used friends immersion chillers and definitely prefer counter flow.

 

10+ gallons down to 65F in 14 minutes in the winter, 1/2 in 50 ft immersion with the pumped return arm. A benefit of living in the frozen north. Summer is longer, of course. Approaching your times.

I get what you say on the area, delta-T helps, and keeping he wort moving helps.

 

thinking about passing on the therminator, and picking up a dudda. great reviews, a bit more cost effective, etc. any dudda users?

 

Only reason I went with a Therminator instead of a duda was the metal used. IIRC the duda uses a different grade of stainless steel that is more prone to erosion than the therminator. There was another brand of heat exchanger out there that I can't remember that was cheaper than the Therminator but used the same grade of stainless.