Beer Wort Chiller - Copper Coil Ordered

Immersion Type Beer Wort Chiller used in Full Grain Brewing

After a lot of looking for a 5 metre coil of 10mm copper pipe and getting disillusioned with a) the price and (b) the rarity of 10mm coils my mate and neighbour, Christophe has got back to me with a quote for the beast at just under 18 euros!!! That's a fair bit more than half of the price I've seen elsewhere.

It turns out his Dad is a plumber who does a lot of brewery fitting! Niiiiice :)

So, the last of my equipment items should be ready within a few hours of it arriving. The design itself is very simple. Cold water passes through the copper coil which is immersed in the hot wort (the unfermented beer, the result of mashing and sparging the malted grains) and lowers the temperature from just below boiling to around 20C so that the yeast can be added.

Add the yeast to the wort when it's hot and it'll kill it.

The wort can be allowed to cool naturally but it can take up to 24 hours which is along time for the (at this stage) very delicate beer to possibly end up in contact with nasties that can easily ruin the whole batch of beer.

So, cool the wort quick, get the yeast in and get it covered!

However, as is my way, I've been toying with another way of doing it...

In order to bring the temperature of the wort from 100C to around 30C requires, on average, the cold water passing through the immersion chiller for upwards of 20-30 minutes. This is along time to have a cold tap running. the initial water exiting the chiller is hot, the transferred heat from the wort the chiller is immersed in, and can be used for washing equipment etc but only a few gallons.

It seems to me in this day of sustaining resources and increasing utility bills, an awful waste of water. I suppose water butts for the garden could be filled but we have a well*so our gardening water is free, no need to run a tap.

I thought instead, what if I pass the hot wort through the coil (rather than the cold water) and instead of immersing the coil in my copper/boiler I immerse it in a large bucket of cold water. Large enough to hold a decent volume of water so it doesn't warm up quickly and also large enough to have a series of frozen 2litre bottles of water placed in to keep re-chilling the surrounding water.... It might just work dammit!

When used the traditional way, the immersion chiller is placed into the boiling wort ten minutes or so before the end of boil to sterilize it. in my case this would be lacking so I would have to sterilize the coil in a large pan of boiling water first. In my case, only the inside of the pipe would be in contact with the hot wort so to be safe, first I'll sit it in a bath of liquid sterilizer, give it a good rinse then boil it.

Just got to wait for the dagnamming thing to arrive now.

*Although we have a well, I have not had the water tested. It smells a bit rough when first pumped out so I don't fancy risking using it anywhere near my beer... Just in case you were thinking I could pump well water (very cold) through my chiller.

An Adventure In Full Grain Brewing At Home

There's something very rewarding about enjoying a pint or three of your very own, home brewed real ale beer. With the combination of cheapo, plastic binge drinking venues serving lousy keg beer, increasing prices, the smoking ban and other things, local real ale pubs are sadly in decline.

I first ventured into the world of home brew in the late nineties and enjoyed many successful batches of beer brewed from readily available kits. 2005 found myself and wife along with our German Shepherd, Holly (nick named "The Wuppit" after a toy she had as a pup that made a noise like, "Wuppit! Wuppit!" when she shook it) up and moving across to France where we had bought a house the year previously in the Limousin, actually the Haute Vienne department (87). Our Holly has been plagued by allergies since she was tiny however and the resulting treatment for those has affected her immune system so she's really fragile, often loses fur due to skin problems but we love her to bits. To see her play you wouldn't think she was fragile and the whole thing doesn't seem to really bother her. So my brewery is going to be named Little Wuppit Brewery.

Don't get me wrong, French beer is nice. There's a wide variety available and we are fortunate to have local micro breweries within 15 minutes drive that both brew very nice, continental style beers. And that's where I began to miss a certain something about good olde English Ales.

The continental brews all have a very similar flavour running through them in my opinion, an underlying sweetness and in many cases although the colour varies the flavour is somewhat lagery and dare I say it, a little bland at times.

One thing I really miss is a good, robust and flavoursome real ale and so I began to look back into home brewing.

Having bought the excellent Home Brewing Self Sufficiency book by John Parkes of the Red Rock micro brewery I was hooked on the idea of starting full grain brewing.

So, being self employed and working from home I have the additional access to sneak away for an hour here and there and get brewing. With this blog I hope to catalogue my journey through brewing and equipment designing and building as well as share my successes and no doubt my disasters with you and along the way

My first task, to build a mash tun with incorporated sparging device... more on which, soon.