Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you my new Wort Chiller

Just built her tonight. For those wondering just what the hell this thing is, it's called an immersion chiller and is used for cooling down the boiling liquid called wort (pronounced wert) which is the unfermented beer.

Basically, when you brew beer you are making a liquid environment for yeast to grow in. The yeast eat sugars and nutrients in the wort and produce 3 things: alcohol, CO2, and more yeast. The problem is that wort is a perfect environment for bacteria and other nasties. Since you can't pitch (the technical term for adding) the yeast until the wort is around 70° F, you have to wait until it cools down from 212° . Since this takes a looooong time, there's plenty of time for other nasties to infect your beer. So the faster you can chill the wort, the better.

The system works like this. The entire contraption is placed into the wort when there is approximately 15 minutes left of boiling. This is to sanitize the tubing. Once the boil is complete, one line of the copper tubing is connected to a faucet or hose and the other into the drain of the sink. Cold water is run slowly through the coil, exchanging the heat from the wort to the water. With a little bit of stirring, hopefully I can have 90° wort in 20 minutes or so.

When the wort is around 90°, I can mix it in with several gallons of boiled (to sanitize) and chilled water. This should get the temperature down to pitching range.

There is another cooling system called a counterflow chiller which works by having a tube within a tube. The outer tube carries cold water in the opposite direction of the inner tube, which carries hot wort. The long distance and counterflow is much more efficient at cooling the liquid. However, counterflows are a bit more complicated to build since they require copper soldering (something I'm not familiar with) and can also be a bear to clean. I plan on building the CF Chiller for my next batch.

Tomorrow is brew time!