The Time Was Right

After looking back on my notes from a few of my earliest batches of home brews, I realize that I have been thinking of making myself a wort chiller for quite a long time now.  Finally this weekend the time was right and I at last have my very own immersion wort chiller.

Despite my swearing and slamming a door at least once, I will say that building one is not difficult at all.  The frustration for me came in part from my profuse sweating and discomfort resulting from being in an unconditioned garage in 90-something degree heat.  The other part of the equation was trying to make it look too pretty and taking apart my first attempt to try and make it better.  Let’s just say that the first version was just fine and I have issues.

Now then, here are the components I started with . . .

The components

You may think that there is a surplus of clamps and in the length of tubing, but my intent was not only to make an immersion chiller, but to also make a smaller pre-chiller.  The cold water out of the tap here in Florida is not exactly that cold so I thought a pre-chiller would make a lot of sense, especially in the warmer months.

After some of that aforementioned frustration, I was ready for a pressure test to look for any possible leaks in the system.

Turning on the water

The idea is that the water will come from the hose through the window above the sink into the pre-chiller that is sitting in an ice bath in one side of the sink.  That should cool the water down nicely before the water leaves that coil and goes to the top of the immersion wort chiller in the pot.  The heat from the wort will transfer through the copper to the colder water and will then travel out of the final run of tubing into the other side of the sink and down the drain.  Soon I will do a temperature test just to see how well that process works.

Here is the close up of the hose attachment . . .

The fanciest part

Though the system will spend its early time in the kitchen, I did leave enough run in the tubing to possibly adapt to an outdoor brewing setup.  At worst I will have to replace the clear tubing with longer lengths, though if I ever move on to larger volume batches I may want to build a larger immersion coil as well.

Stay tuned . . .