Imerssion chillers vs other types

[Sadfield]

Wrestling 10m of microbore is a rite of passage.

 

[Clint]

I coiled it round ok it was putting the bends in the tails I messed up a bit.

 

[jambop]

Interesting about double chillers. I'd spotted that my existing chiller would fit inside the one I got with the BZ and I'd toyed with the idea of either daisy chaining them (out from one and into the other) or rig up some fittings so they ran in parallel. Might try daisy chaining first.

I use mine in parallel and it works great. I actually have three which can all be used individually for very good rate of chilling in a big kettle. thermodynamics says hotter to colder so defo use in individually for faster cooling efficeincy. The hot water can be used for cleaning. The real secret for me is using a paddle stirrer a la grainfather with a hand drill this makes a huge difference to the cooling time in my experience and oxygenates the wort.

 

[RoomWithABrew]

Yes so many things in brewing are fashion. I call brewing gear new HiFi With regard to the Irish moss yes but I never regard my beer made until after it is fermented so I don't fine my beer

The thing I learnt about HiFi is to stop looking at the magazines and reviews after you've bought it. That way you aren't chasing the end of the rainbow.
Trouble is these forums!!

 

[hoppyscotty]

With an immersion chiller you're trying to cool the entire volume of wort in one go. The ratio of surface area of your immersion chiller surface area to wort volume is really poor so they take a long time and your heat transfer coefficient gets worse as the wort chills - its that last 10 degrees or so that takes the longes to cool. If you look at the best immersion chillers like the Jaded ones, they massively increase surface area, so no cleverness or witchcraft going on just a simple case of bigger is better. Actually you're better off pumping your wort through an immersion chiller in a large bucket of cold water and recirculate water through the bucket, and maybe chucking in a load of ice into the bucket for your last 10 degrees or so, but then you're approximating a CFC chiller but just not as good as a proper CFC chiller.

With counterflow and plate you're taking a small amount of wort and cooling that as it passes through the chiller. If you size your chiller correctly and use them as intended then the idea is to pump your wort directly into your fermenter through the chiller and the wort will be cooled to yeast pitching temp in one pass through the chiller. They are not really intended to be recurulated back into the kettle to cool the entire volume of wort...though this is how alot of people use them. Also with a decent plat chiller you should be able to cool your wort to within a degree of the cooling water/fluid they are that efficient.

Benefit of CFC/plate chiller if sized and used correctly is consistency...if you can chill your wort down in a repeatable time then you will have consistent IBU's every time...if it takes 30 - 40 mins to cool which varies through the year due to ground water temp through the seasons you will get a different beer through the seasons.

downsides of CFC/plate chillers, though mostly plate chillers, is risk of blockage and keeping them clean, which to be fair is a PITA on the homebrew scale, especially with a brazed plate chiller which is not designed for wort and really designed for heating systems...you'll find one in your gas boiler so very little tolerance for the odd grain husk passing through...and the brazed element of them is not compatible with the stronger brewery cleaners.

No wrong way to do it...horses for courses, you pay your money and takes your chances and work within your limitations.

To say anything is 'not necessary' is a bit odd on the basis brewing your own beer in the first place is not necessary when you can buy it. Depends what you're trying to achieve.

 

[An Ankoù]

It's the same old question of home-brewing v industrial brewing on a tiny scale. A 30-50 minute cool (depending on the groundwater temperature) is perfectly OK as far as I'm concerned. In fact I chill to below 80C, add my "whirlpool" hops, chill a few more degrees and then let it finish cooling overnight. Why do we need to flash chill to on this scale? Sure, it makes the brew day shorter and all the quicker to clean up ad put away the equipment. I would hope that, on the industrial scale, attempts are made to salvage the energy anyway.

Benefit of CFC/plate chiller if sized and used correctly is consistency...if you can chill your wort down in a repeatable time then you will have consistent IBU's every time...if it takes 30 - 40 mins to cool which varies through the year due to ground water temp through the seasons you will get a different beer through the seasons.

Never come across this before. If it takes me a few minutes longer to cool my wort from one batch to another, how is that going to affect my IBUs and consistency of my beer? I don't believe it. The way my hops are stored, whether the pack has been open and how long they've taken to arrive in the post is going to have more effect on my IBUs than a few minutes extra cooling time. Of course, if you're doing 15 minute boils with a load of hops, there will be a bit of a dfference. Solution, treat your hops as you would Brussels sprouts.

 

[jambop]

I find that one part of the cooling process ofter over looked by imerssion chiller users is getting the flow rate right and having the wort in constant motion through the cooling coils. If you set the rate too high you will use more water and be wasteful. If you get it right you will cool the wort at a reasonable rate and get a good volume of very hot water to wash up at the end of the day. But I do repeat if you are using an imerssion chiller without wort mixing you are wasting time and water. I whirlpool my wort at a very good rate and my 25L of wort is cooled in less than 20 mins everytime .

 

[hoppyscotty]

I've 'invested' in a decent plate chiller and can empty 70 litres from my kettle into the fermenter in about 8 minutes or so from flame out boil or hopstand temp to pitching temp in a single pass. So the wort left in the kettle over that 8 mins is pulling IBU's and other flavour impacts from the hops. In an ideal world you'd have a magic wand and cool the wort down instantaneously to immediately halt any contributions, but we don't have that. So if you're taking 40 mins to cool from 75 degrees say to pitching temp with an immersion chiller as it does in summer with 20 lites in my Brewzilla and the supplied Brewzilla immersion chiller...maybe ten mins quicker in winter and colder ground water, then that is a massive window where the wort is pulling flavour contributions in an uncontrolled way...That will impact the flavour of your final beer and certainly make any consistency difficult if you're one of those that like to brew the same beers over and over again. If you're brewing larger than 20 litre batches then cooling time will be even longer unless you get a larger capacity chiller.

So that is the benefit of quick cooling. Again only an issue if that is important to you..not saying it will spoil your beer, but its not a very repeatable process so if repeatability is important to you then having a consistent and repeatable chilling time is an important factor.

The pro side it is vital of course to have product consistency and to get the throughput as they will be constantly brewing so every minute delay spent chilling is a minute delay to getting the next batch through and that impacts process time that impacts production costs and ultimately makes your product more expensive.

 

[RoomWithABrew]

Solution, treat your hops as you would Brussels sprouts.

I've put my Brussels sprouts on last week, got to to be ready for Christmas!!

 

[jambop]

I've 'invested' in a decent plate chiller and can empty 70 litres from my kettle into the fermenter in about 8 minutes or so from flame out boil or hopstand temp to pitching temp in a single pass. So the wort left in the kettle over that 8 mins is pulling IBU's and other flavour impacts from the hops. In an ideal world you'd have a magic wand and cool the wort down instantaneously to immediately halt any contributions, but we don't have that. So if you're taking 40 mins to cool from 75 degrees say to pitching temp with an immersion chiller as it does in summer with 20 lites in my Brewzilla and the supplied Brewzilla immersion chiller...maybe ten mins quicker in winter and colder ground water, then that is a massive window where the wort is pulling flavour contributions in an uncontrolled way...That will impact the flavour of your final beer and certainly make any consistency difficult if you're one of those that like to brew the same beers over and over again. If you're brewing larger than 20 litre batches then cooling time will be even longer unless you get a larger capacity chiller.

So that is the benefit of quick cooling. Again only an issue if that is important to you..not saying it will spoil your beer, but its not a very repeatable process so if repeatability is important to you then having a consistent and repeatable chilling time is an important factor.

The pro side it is vital of course to have product consistency and to get the throughput as they will be constantly brewing so every minute delay spent chilling is a minute delay to getting the next batch through and that impacts process time that impacts production costs and ultimately makes your product more expensive.

Not going to argue with you about the minimal difference encountered when cooling wort and hop extraction BUT an experiment conducted by a home brewer using normal hombrew volumes showed that a group of vary experienced beer drinkers could not detect a difference between a beer rated at 12 IBU and another at 24 IBU ! I am very skeptical that the differences in IBU you are talking about would be detectable to most people if any.
https://brulosophy.com/2021/08/30/low-vs-high-ibu-in-a-blonde-ale-exbeeriment-results/

 

[An Ankoù]

I've put my Brussels sprouts on last week, got to to be ready for Christmas!!

I prefer mine al dente so they'll go on at Easter.

 

[An Ankoù]

As a matter of interest, how do you do a partial chill to, say, 80C, in order to do a hopstand? Do you recirculate back into the kettle?

 

[hoppyscotty]

Well there is the rub. We're all limited by the tools at our disposal and just because your recipe calculates x IBU's doesn't necessarily mean you're achieving x IBU's...the actual IBU's you're achieving will be very different precisely because as home brewers we don't have very good or repeatable process control. Think it was one of the Harry Brew 69 YouTube vids where he sent off a can or sample of one of his beers to have the IBU's tested in a lab and they came out very different to what he thought he was brewing. So no wonder people cant detect small differences because there might not actually be any difference. As home brewers we don't have labs to analyse our beers so don't actually know what we end up with and assume we're getting close to the recipe we're following.

Also there is the issue with home brewing that you rarely brew simultaneous batches...so cant do proper back to back comparisons. you brew with months separating different batches so often rely on remembering what a beer tasted like several months ago...and when it comes to things like that human memory is not very reliable.

If you could brew simultaneous batches of exactly the same beer, brewed on exactly identical kit under exactly the same conditions with the one and only difference being shooting for a different IBU and did a back to back taste of the beers, then I reckon you could taste the difference....might not be a huge difference..I have no feel what 1 IBU is....but there would be a difference.

I've experienced something similar on wine tasting experiences... Normally I'll buy wine individually and compare one bottle to one I remember drinking several weeks ago..and often come to the conclusion there is little difference between a £6 bottle, £20 bottle so no point in spending more that £6, but when I've been on a wine tasting experience and sampled four or five wines back to back across a massive price range then the difference between the wines is stark.

Not looking for an argument...this is a sharing of differing views and opinions hopefully backed up by our experiences. We're all in this game for different reasons and there will be people who couldn't give a stuff if the current batch of beer is anywhere near similar to the last one so long as its good...but for me personally consistency is a key driver for me and as such I'll hone my processes, recipes and equipment to try my best to achieve consistency. Wether I'm brewing good or bad beer is one thing so long as whichever one it is i'm doing it consistently is far more important....for me.

 

[hoppyscotty]

As a matter of interest, how do you do a partial chill to, say, 80C, in order to do a hopstand? Do you recirculate back into the kettle?

With my plate chiller I'll already be recirculating through the chiller of the last 10 mins of the boil or so, so at flame out (or element off) I'll just turn on the water supply and I'll recirculate back into the kettle via a whirlpool port and give it an occasional stir to prevent any stratification layers (if that is the correct word). Takes a few mins. To be fair with my Brewzilla and immersion chiller it only takes a few mins to drop to hopstand temps too. Think with my BZ I could get down from about 75 degrees to 45 degrees pretty quickly, but 45 degrees to mid 20's took the bulk of the time as the heat transfer efficiency drops off a cliff. and in summer I'd often abandon after an hour so so at about 33 degrees and transfer into fermenter and finish off in the fridge before pitching, so taking another hour and some KW's of electricity...

 

[Sadfield]

20-50% of IBUs can be lost in the first 2 days of fermentation. And we're terrible at detecting them. IIRC c5 IBU increments.

 

[An Ankoù]

Conclusion. The only way to get consistency is to measure IBUs prior to packaging and adjust with isomerised hop extract, We, too, can make Bud!

 

[jambop]

With my plate chiller I'll already be recirculating through the chiller of the last 10 mins of the boil or so, so at flame out (or element off) I'll just turn on the water supply and I'll recirculate back into the kettle via a whirlpool port and give it an occasional stir to prevent any stratification layers (if that is the correct word). Takes a few mins. To be fair with my Brewzilla and immersion chiller it only takes a few mins to drop to hopstand temps too. Think with my BZ I could get down from about 75 degrees to 45 degrees pretty quickly, but 45 degrees to mid 20's took the bulk of the time as the heat transfer efficiency drops off a cliff. and in summer I'd often abandon after an hour so so at about 33 degrees and transfer into fermenter and finish off in the fridge before pitching, so taking another hour and some KW's of electricity...

I do not understand that I can take 28 L of boiling wort to 28 C using about 150 L of water in about 20mins even in summer when the ground water is at 22 C or so ? I hasten to add all my cooling water is recycled into the graden for irrigating my veg garden so I have no qualms about using 150L of water to cool my wort.

 

[Agentgonzo]

I do not understand that I can take 28 L of boiling wort to 28 C using about 150 L of water in about 20mins even in summer when the ground water is at 22 C or so ? I hasten to add all my cooling water is recycled into the graden for irrigating my veg garden so I have no qualms about using 150L of water to cool my wort.

I use a slower flow rate and generally chill 23L of wort to 20°C in about 30 minutes using 80-100L of water using the grainfather CFC. YMMV

 

[jambop]

I use a slower flow rate and generally chill 23L of wort to 20°C in about 30 minutes using 80-100L of water using the grainfather CFC. YMMV

The ground water temp and constant mixing of the wort is key. In the hot summer for example I can easily cool to 26-28 C in 20 mins or so but in winter I have to be careful not to chill too much because the ground water temp has by then fallen to maybe 10C .

 

[Twostage]

I prefer mine al dente so they'll go on at Easter.

Would you believe I tray baked the last of the sprouts last night. They've been in the unheated conservatory (which we use as a fridge/larder in winter) since before Christmas. There were only a handful that were still cookable. (I was going to say 'edible' rather than 'cookable' but I know many would contest that sprouts are ever edible ).