The Homemade Copper Chiller Coil

Again, digging through the archives of random crap I have shot whilst brewing over the last few years, I came across this little gem.  It is from late 2009, and my esteemed brewing friend & homebrew mentor @Brewnut was trying out brewing a mini-mash using his new brew kettle & burner setup.

In previous brews, we had always had an issue with cooling the brew from the hot break back down to a safe temperature for pitching the yeast.  Attempts had included sitting the brew kettle in the sink surrounded by ice and of course, just waiting for it to cool down.  *Hint: a covered brew kettle does not cool down very quickly.  The lid you put on top to stop it from getting infected also keeps the heat in….

Previous attempts at cooling the wort.

Based on the past experiences, @Brewnut and I had had lengthy discussions over beer looking at plate chillers and such on the interwebs, and decided that that was a little beyond our budget and needs, then he remembered he had a bunch of copper piping left over from the bathroom reno and an idea formed.  I should mention at this stage that besides being an accomplished brewer, @Brewnut is also a bit of a MacGyver when it comes to building, well, just about anything.

Using the copper tube, a pump he had lying around, some garden hose, some ice and and esky, he built a very cool and very functional wort chiller coil.  Trés cool.

The homemade homebrew copper chiller coil in action.

At the start of things, it was dropping a degree every few seconds.  This did slow as the ice melted, and in hindsight I should have not been quite so tight and bought a few more bags of ice.  From memory I bought 4 bags of ice, but I really should have bought 6, and topped up the esky about half way through.  Still as a first time experiment, very cool.

Not sure on the costs of this.  I was informed that the copper tubing isn’t cheap, but the rest of it is either parts from around the house, or a quick (cheap-ish) trip to Bunnings.  Either way, it will be much cheaper than the cost of a plate chiller, and you get the price of building something yourself.  If you want further details, comment on the post, and I will ask @Brewnut to kindly provide some further info on the specifics.

Tags: Brewnut, chiller coil, homebrew, minimash, Wobbles, wort