Build a Better Wort Chiller

So we finally enhanced the wort chiller several weeks ago, but there hasn’t been anything posted (read: I am lazy). The wait is over friends because here you have it our wonderfully more efficient wort chiller!

To review: Our immersion wort chiller is not particularly efficient because the coils of copper tubing end up just piling on top of each other in the bottom of the kettle like a slinky. To fix this we decided to get some heavy duty copper wire and weave it in and out between the twists of the tubing in order to hold the coils apart. That way we could actually get some cooling at the level of the wort near the top of the kettle where it is hottest (Heat rises…).

To get supplies I made a stop over at Home Depot which I would say is the store we visit second most after our homebrew shop. I have always thought that one of the most fun parts of homebrewing is cobbling random hardware together into workable equipment. Originally I had thought that 12ft of wire was going to be more than enough to make about three separate columns of wire up and down the chiller. In the end we only had enough to do it twice. This wire is 12 gauge insulated copper wire, that we stripped. As far as wire stripping is concerned, you should be sure you have wire strippers ahead of time because stripping 12 feet of wire with a box cutter is not fun. At all. I am talking blisters.

In any case, after we finished it turns out that we had made it about three or four inches too tall so I would suggest you take the time to measure out the normal height of the hot wort in your kettle and build your chiller from there. We on the other hand, prefer the ass backwards way of making the chiller, finding out it’s too tall and then bending the topmost weaves to compact the whole structure while it is sitting in near boiling wort burning our fingers. Yes, we went to college.

It works much better now than it used to. Note that you want the cooling water to enter the topmost coils and go through the bottom coils last (Again, heat rises…). We cut the cooling time to go from a boil to pitching temperature by about fifteen to twenty minutes.

There you go readers, you have finally gotten some useful information from us! Today we are bottling the Belgian (Not named yet but trying to avoid going with 2.0 on this one as with the stout) so hopefully get some notes about that up later. Cheers!