Chilling wort with ice?

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You probably want to sanitize them first and use a sanitized knife to open the jugs. Otherwise, there shouldn't be a problem. Freezing and thawing would not be a problem.

Derric

Another tack might be to do a 2 gal boil, chill the remaining 3 gallons of liquor (water), fill your sink up with ice and water, cool the 2 gallons of wort by putting it in the sink/ice water (while still in the kettle of course) to knock down the boil temp a bit, and then pouring the wort and chilled liquor into your fermenter. No fuss, no muss.

The risk of infection is much higher if you choose to pour the extremely vulnerable fresh wort over an vessel that holds ice. The wort is in an effectively sterile container already, so why not leave it there and let it sit in an ice bath to cool down. Once the wort has dropped below 70C (dunno what that is in F!!) I gently stir in one direction and then stir the ice water in an opposite / counterflow direction to help exchange heat between the hot and cold layers against the kettle skin. Cheers, Rowan Canberra Brewers Club Australia

Couple concerns...

1. Outside sanitation. Regular gallon milk jugs seem beaten up, and can harbor foul bacteria. So try your best to sanitize the outside.

1. Inside sanitation, and water quality. Since the milk could split, due to temperature differences, you might intro due water into your wort. So make sure the water is clean, and a quality that you use for your normal beer making.

Now that you mentioned this process, I'll tell you what I do for cooling the wort. I fill my sink with ice water, and put my whole cooking pot into it. I does seem to work, maybe not as fast as a heat exchanger, but works.

I've heard one person mention one idea in the past. Fill your primary fermentor(plastic) with the typical water you add to get your final amount. Sanitize, and put the whole thing into a chest freezer. Remove before cooking your malt. Allow it to defrost enough to free it self from the walls of the fermentor. Then add your hot wort to it, SLOWLY. I've never done this, but it sounds feasible.

IMHO,

tom @

Invest in one. I have a nice copper one, which I fitted quick release connectors to (versus standard hose thread) - when I make a batch, I just run a couple of hoses in through the window of my barn workshop, one from a faucet, and the other running out to a sprinkler. Fire up the sprinkler, and I'm not wasting the water, though it sure does come out warm. This will drop the temperature of the wort 100'F in less than 10 minutes.

Besides sanitation issues, you need to consider some issues of thermodynamics. Ick, thermodynamics and brewing? Well, it's not complicated: cooling is a function of surface area. That's why car radiators have all the little tubes with fins on them - to expose the maximum surface area to the airflow. In the case of your milkjug ice coolers, the only part of the cooler that is coing to contact the beer is the exterior surface, and once the ice there has exchanged heat with the wort, it'll be warm water INSIDE the jug, with the ice block floating in the MIDDLE of that.

The reason a wort chiller works so effectively is that there's a LOT of surface area, the material is a good heat conductor, and there's a FLOW of coolant (water) through it, so as it picks up heat, it TAKES IT AWAY.

If you want to cool something in an ice chest, a 7 lb bag of ice cubes will be more effective than a 20 lb block, because the ice cubes can manage more surface contact with the item to be cooled. I'm NOT suggesting you drop a bunch of ice cubes into your wort though .

A good wort chiller is worth the investment.

Thanks, I've also done a little research on this subject (wort chillers) and I'm told that the easiest thing to do in my area is to buy two of them and put them back to back. The reason is that I live in a hot climate (Houston) and our tap water comes out at >80' most of the year.

So you buy 2, hook em together, put the first one in a bucket of ice (to cool the tap water) and the 2nd one in your wort.

jrprice wrote on 7/26/2006 7:07 PM:

I never thought of this as a problem. I just add the water to my fermenter (guess quantity) to bring it up to the 5gal mark. That is, if I have 3 gal of wort cooking, I add one gallon of water, and keep adding ice. I then pour the hot wort right in to the cold water. Cools it down right away.

Jim

Ewww.

I live north of San Francisco, and while I'm not totally out in the boonies, my property is rural (now within an incorporated city). so my water comes from a well on my property, rather than from a municipal supply. It is amazing how cool the water can be even on a hot day when it's being pumped from 100' below the surface.

Yea, that's doable.

Bear in mind that you can purchase copper tubing at the hardware store, and with only a little bit of inventiveness, form it into a coil yourself (the chief trick is to not try to make too small of a coil, or to bend it too quickly). Your primary hurdle is getting it _started_ - once you've got one run around your form, the remaining coils should be easy enough to form.

If you've got an ice bucket or chest, forming the ice bath coil to fit to that (rather than being smaller) would be optimal - it's all about surface area.

Of course, if you've never bent pipe before (I've done automotive fuel and hydraulic lines, plus EMT, etc, so I've got these tools in my garage), you probably don't want to LEARN on copper - it's pretty expensive (which is why the prefab chillers cost so much). Excepting custom sizing, there's probably little to be gained from fabbing your own - the one I bought cost only about $20 more than I know the copper tubing itself would have cost (minus the compression fittings and time).

Bottom line: if you're planning on making a couple batches a year, the wort chiller won't be a wasted investment. If someone were trying homebrewing for the heck of it, and wasn't likely to stick with it, then it'd be an added and unnecessary expense (though, if they chilled their wort quicker, perhaps they wouldn't see homebrewing as such a chore).

If you live in the Seattle area, try

and buy a

10'-12' piece of scrap copper tubing from them for $1.35. I'm sure other cities have equivalent places, so search them out and get cheap raw materials to play with. I dunno about you, but all the chillers I find run about $20...

Sean Straw (to email, replace lutefisk with mail) writed:

Put dried sand into the copper tubing , close the ends (of tubing), apply some heat and make the coil. Sand maintains round the inner of coil, so it's not crushed. Use an oven drying sand, it's easy ! For tubings, use a plumber's gasoline torch.

Sorry for my broken English ! Ciao, P.

Go to home depot, get a roll of 3/8 or 1/2 copper tubing, about 30 feet to a roll. And pick up a tubing bender, about 6.00. Wrap the tubing around your plastic bucket, slip the bender over the tubing where you want to bend it back through the coils and at the other end of the coils, just like it shows in the catalogs. Then put a length of plastic tubing on each end, hose clamp it tight and viola, wort chiller.

Now I took the "in" of mine and put a 1/2 inch plastic tube on it and connect it to an electric fountain pump. Pumps about 6-10gpm.

I put my brew pot in a deep sink, with the stopper in, put the pump in the bottom of the sink, fill the sink with ice and water and plug the pump in. Boil to Pitch in 12 minutes using a full 6.5gallon boil.

Total cost for the chiller, 25bucks, pump another 25 ease and speed of chilling, priceless.

Luck to ya.

25' of copper tubing at Home Depot is currently over $50. At this moment in time, buying a complete immersion wort chiller is much less expensive than building one.

Is it possible that a store bought wort cooler uses less copper, as in feet?

later,

tom @