Hybrid chill

[Keynes]

Hi all,

I'm a no chill brewer who usually brews 10-12 litre batches. I'm considering switching to chilling and am weighing up the options.

I don't have a pool to quickly chill in a cube. So am toying with the idea of splitting my 12 litre batch into smaller containers. Then I'd place the containers into a tub filled with water. My thinking is that splitting the batch across multiple smaller containers could speed up chilling by utilizing a a larger surface area? Wondering if anyone has tried anything similar?

Cheers

 

[yankinoz]

Your proposal would be extra work to slight advantage. In those volumes, if your sanitation is good, don't stress over chilling fast.

Chill to what temps? What's the temp and volume of your cooling water. To speed cooling, you change cooling water, use ice, or both.

To give one example, in my ultra-high-tech brewery I've chilled well over a hundred 20+L batches by placing the brew kettle in a plastic tub from Bunnings, changed the water once and then used ice with occasional stirring to lower the batch to pitching temps or in some brews to below 4 degrees to drop cold break. Never had an infection.

 

[hotwaterpls]

Depends on what you want out of chilling. Plenty of discussion to be had around pros and cons of chilling vs no chill, I'd say formation of DMS compounds (lagers are usually mentioned here) and over utilisation of hops are probably the main points of contention.

I went to 10L cubes (which actually hold about 12L full when hot) rather than 1x 23L. If I'm slightly over volume, the excess becomes a starter or gets ditched. If I'm slightly under, I can slightly underfill both and squeeze out the air.

The potential benefit I see here is being able to add hops to one cube and "blend" the two when added to the fermenter to reduce the impact of extra bitterness while the wort is still hot.

Added benefit of being able to use a form of drauflassen (I considered going for a number of different sized containers to be able to decant one for a starter then add the rest later also).

Downside is it's more cubes to clean and they probably take up a little more space than less cubes of the same total volume.

 

[clickeral]

Considering just buying a cooling coil?

 

[Keynes]

Your proposal would be extra work to slight advantage. In those volumes, if your sanitation is good, don't stress over chilling fast.

Chill to what temps? What's the temp and volume of your cooling water. To speed cooling, you change cooling water, use ice, or both.

To give one example, in my ultra-high-tech brewery I've chilled well over a hundred 20+L batches by placing the brew kettle in a plastic tub from Bunnings, changed the water once and then used ice with occasional stirring to lower the batch to pitching temps or in some brews to below 4 degrees to drop cold break. Never had an infection.

It's a good point regarding a lot of extra work for marginal gain.

My objective with cooling is to lock in a hop profile by reducing temps to say 50c relatively quickly. I'm tempted just to grab a largish Bunnings container, place cube in said container and and fill the outer container with water until the water level is equal to the height of the cube.

Considering just buying a cooling coil?

Yeah, it's a fair call. Just wanting to explore options. I'd probably lean towards making a pipe based heat exchanger, as I like to DIY.

I think one advantage of chilling in the cube is that I don't have to get it all the way to fermentation temp. I assume I could get the cube to 50c say pretty quickly taking advantage of the fact it's easier to cool when the wort is hot. Then leave overnight to cool the remainder.

The way I see it I have to basically get the wort to near pitching using a coil?

 

[yankinoz]

In a cube with air excluded, the hop oils aren't going anywhere fast as you cool.

 

[Lefty]

I've been 'no chill' brewing from when I started but recently started using my external water tank ( enviro points for building) and using a 'Barra box' I can chill to around 30 deg C in around 40 mins putting the heated water back into the tank (no waste water) ! I have a stainless steel cooling coil ( used once) and a G30 Counter flow wort chiller used twice. The cooling Cube ( I have two)and the Barra Box is so simple and fast and chills whilst I'm cleaning up after a brew.