Heretically, I tend to use my chiller the other way round - connecting the outlet from the boiler to the chiller and running the wort through the coils suspended in a bucket of chilled water. It goes in hot and comes out cool, giving a cooling time of around five minutes for a five-gallon brew. You do have to be more careful with cleaning though, flushing the tube through with a very hot sterilising solution and clean water before and afterwards.
lr110td5
Joined: 20 May 2005 Posts: 37 Location: Kerpen, Germany
Posted: Mon May 23, 05 11:56 am Post subject:
The ultimate is a contraflow system whereby one tube sits within another. The hot beer wort flows through the inner one and the cold water passes in the opposite direction. Bit tricky to make though and terribly expensive to buy ready-made. The post from DavidW describes the version which is the easiest to make and to sanitise. I made mine using approx. 6m of tubing, wrapped around a fire extinguisher as a former. You have to swish it about a little during operation, otherwise it only cools locally. The hot water coming out should be collected and used for cleaning your brewing equipment.
Irrespective of the method used, rapid cooling of the hot wort is a procedure which I would strongly recommend because the risk of bacterial infection is very high at this stage.
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