#plate chiller

[forcera]

Trying out a new toy I got. It’s an A style camlock that threads onto a garden hose. It makes flushing out the plate chiller and HERMS coil much easier.

I also cleaned our club’s system before our brew day next weekend. The plate chiller needed some extra attention.

[grimmlinkeeper]

Last weekend we did a collaborative brew with several members of our home brew club and a plate chiller was involved. I am in love. No splashing involved. Instead of cold water running through copper coils, this runs the cold water through a plate, with your beer running through the plate also. It used less water, took less time than a copper chiller and got the wort colder. It was coming out at 68 degrees! We will be purchasing one soon. We figure, since we haven't upgraded our equipment in 4 years, we kinda deserve to.

[findmybeering]

Brewing: Cooling the wort

As a (very novice) home brewer, one of my biggest challenges so far has been trying to find the most efficient way to cool down my wort (the result of boiling the malt with the hops for an hour).  Since the wort is basically what will be come the actual beer, the handling of this concoction is extremely important.

My current method is the most common among novice brewers- the ice bath.  Thankfully we have a rather large and deep sink in our kitchen, which is plenty big enough to contain the 3 gallon "brew pot" I borrow from my mother-in-law.  The basic idea is to place the brew pot, containing 200+ degree boiling wort, into the sink filled with ice and water.  The ideal result is to get the temperature of the wort down to 70 to 80 degrees within half an hour.

The first time I attempted this I was vastly unprepared.  I quickly exhausted our large supply of ice cubes from the ice cube maker in the freezer and the wort seemed to hardly drop much in temperature.  Thankfully I remembered the 12 or so milk jugs full of ice in our large freezer for keeping energy costs down, and 4 of those fit perfectly around the brew pot.  It still took much longer to cool the wort, about 45 minutes to an hour, and the resulting beer ended up with a hazy appearance when chilled, appropriately called "chill haze."

The second batch of beer I made turned out better in this area.  I had the large gallons of ice ready and a larger supply of ice cubes; thankfully I got the wort chilled in close to half an hour.  The resulting beer still suffered a little chill haze, but the style of brew was intended to be a bit cloudy.

Between these first two of my brews, I've been thinking a lot about finding a more efficient way to overcome this crucial barrier, especially since there are more efficient methods.  One of the more common and easy to create is an immersion chiller.  This is basically about 25 feet of copper piping coiled up about a dozen times to fit inside of the brew pot once the wort is finished boiling.  Both ends stick up out of the pot and are attached to a water source that pumps cold faucet water through the pipe and cools the wort.  While this method would certainly help and would be the cheapest option at around $30-40 to make (twice as much to buy), I kept on looking.

The next step up is a counterflow chiller, which is very similar in design to the immersion chiller.  The length of copper piping is contained inside of an outer jacket, usually made up of garden hose.  The wort is pumped through the copper piping in this instance, while water is pumped through the hose in the opposite direction, effectively chilling the wort to the right temperature needed to pitch the yeast once it exits.  The biggest downside to this method is that the copper can be difficult to clean and santitize, though the price wouldn't be much higher than an immersion chiller.

The last option and the one I'm leaning towards is a plate chiller.  This is similar to the counterflow, except much more compact.  The hot wort enters and exits the chiller in one direction, while the cold water flows in the opposite direction.  However, the plate chiller is made up of 10-60 thin steel plates stacked on top of one another, alternating between wort and water in each separating chamber.  With a larger surface area for the heat to be distributed, this is the most efficient method, but of course there are drawbacks.  Since the space between plates is so small, filtering of all hops matter must be contained prior to chilling to avoid any clogging.  Also, plate chillers are the most expensive option, running anywhere from $60 to $200.

For myself, I have a little bit of time to think about my next step (my brew tomorrow will obviously need to use an ice bath).  I'd really like to add a more efficient upgrade to my brew process, but I don't want to spend money on a cheaper product if it won't work the best, such as an immersion chiller.  A smaller 20-plate chiller might be the best bet price-wise and hassle-wise in the near future, and if it works well I could upgrade to a 40-60 plate chiller later in my brewing "career."