Wort chilling experiment

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MrRook

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I've got three gallons of wheat beer on the go and came up with an ingenious (?) way to chill it without an official wort chiller.
The plan is to insert a 1.5 gallon pot that been filled with water and frozen into the 5.5 gallon brew pot to cool it down.
 

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I've got three gallons of wheat beer on the go and came up with an ingenious (?) way to chill it without an official wort chiller.
The plan is to insert a 1.5 gallon pot that been filled with water and frozen into the 5.5 gallon brew pot to cool it down.
Make sure it's sanitised and don't fill it to the brim only filling half way and with this you can exchange the water inside for ice or cooler water. Simple heat exchanger.
 
I've heard of people doing similar dunk cooling using frozen PET bottles or zip lock bags of ice with good results.
 
Make sure it's sanitised and don't fill it to the brim only filling half way and with this you can exchange the water inside for ice or cooler water. Simple heat exchanger.
I have a container of starsan standing by. I wasn't sure about how full and went about 2/3s of the way.
 
Don’t know if this is any use but I use an immersion chiller in a bucket of water to pre-chill my cooling water that passes through a second immersion chiller in the hot wort. Use it mostly in the summer when the mains cold water isn’t cold enough. Anyhow, to cool my 23 litres of wort from 30C to 22C-23C I chuck a 2 kg bag of ice into the water in the pre-chill bucket. Might give you an idea of how much ice you’ll need to chill your wort - works out about 100 grms of ice for every litre of wort for a 10C temperature drop......roughly :confused.:
 
Turned off the heat at 10:15 am, it was 118f at 3:45 pm when I started using the ice pot, and 66f at 4:25 pm. Not the quickest cool down, but it worked like I hoped it would.
IMG_20210830_154428.jpg
 
I've got an immersion chiller connected to a fountain pump. Pump goes in a bucket which I run tap water into to pre-chill. When down to about 50C I dump ice in the bucket and recirculate this until pitching temp is reached. I get 100C to 50C in around 30 minutes.
 
In theory you can calculate with a high degree of accuracy how many litres of ice at say -18C it will take to chill 20 L of wort at 100C .
Its all about latent heat to transforn ice to water.. and a bit more maths about the temp and volume differences. Any takers? Ill have a go later today.
 
In theory you can calculate with a high degree of accuracy how many litres of ice at say -18C it will take to chill 20 L of wort at 100C .
Its all about latent heat to transforn ice to water.. and a bit more maths about the temp and volume differences. Any takers? Ill have a go later today.
See my post #8 above :laugh8:
 

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