Wort Chiller

When you don't have a big professional setup for brewing, a lot of the brewing time is just waiting. Particularly when you're waiting for the wort to cool. Your objective is to cool the wort, which is basically beer without yeast, from about 170 degrees down to around 75 degrees. This is so you don't kill your yeast when you add it.

It's highly recommended to cool it as fast as possible so you don't get off-flavors, but unless you want to pay a good deal of money for what's known as a wort chiller, you only have a few options.

I consider myself to be a bit of a handyman, so when I was presented with this dilemma, I decided to build my solution.

I headed to the local hardware store and picked up about 25' of 3/8" copper tubing, a few random fittings, a garden hose, and some solder.

Here is what I ended up with...




My brewing pot is about 16" in diameter, so I wanted my coil to be about 8" in diameter so that the wort would cool evenly. I can explain more about this if anyone is actually interested how my logic works. It's actually pretty simple.














Here is my coil before I applied the intake and outtake lines.












I decided to solder the fittings outside on our porch so I wouldn't stink up the house and/or burn it down. All went well.



The complete set. The idea behind the intake and outtake being on separate sides is so I can hang the chiller on the rim of the brewing kettle so it is suspended the wort. Not sure if it matters, but why not?

If you've been wondering how this little setup would work. Here is your answer.


Simply.

Attach the garden hose sections. One to each side. One hose connects to an outside faucet and the other goes out into the yard. The cold water travels through the copper tubing and chills the tubing from inside. Copper takes on temperature very easily. The cold copper cools the wort from inside.

Surprisingly, it worked very well. It cut our cooling process down from about an hour and a half to nearly 20 minutes. It also cost about a sixth of what I would have paid to buy one.

Problem solved.