Wort Chillers

[sosman]

Mine is 9 metres long (I flogged the other half of the roll to someone else).

More details at: http://brewiki.org/CounterFlowChiller

 

[NRB]

Mine's the Goliath CFWC - 6m copper in 5m black fire hose. I gravity feed it also. It's slow, but works well. I sit the boiler at around 1m with the fermenter on the ground; I'm sure the flow would be faster if I put the kettle higher, but I don't want to scorch myself on the stinking hot kettle bottom!

 

[pint of lager]

The combination of wort flow through the chiller, length of chiller, temperature of cooling water and the final wort temp are all interlinked.

Then of course, there is the flow rate of the cooling water, turbulent flow, resistance of the wort in the chiller and the diameter of the wort pipe to consider.

My chiller is gravity fed, there is very little head between the boiler and the fermenter. The wort flows nice and slow and ends up close to the cooling water temperature.

If you speed up the process by using a pump, you may find the chiller doesn't chill enough.