Wort Chiller Types

All home brewers remember their first brew.  From the boiling of the wort to cracking open your very first home brewed perfection.  Okay, okay, your first brew was probably not perfection but it was yours and definitely not some mass produced, watered down version of beer.  If you are anything like me, you purchased a kit and started in your kitchen with some extract and hops.  After the boil you ever so carefully placed your pot of dreams in your kitchen sink, bath tub, or plastic bin filled with ice water in a futile attempt to quickly cool the wort down to yeast pitching temperature. 

The question remains, why did my first few batches turn out not as expected?  As a new brewer, it could be any one of a number of reasons, but more than likely it is some type of bacteria.  Think of it like this, you slave over your beer and in the process little communist bacteria sneak in and contaminate your wort stealing your dreams of fermented freedom.  The bacteria invade your wort while you are standing there watching the mercury in your wife’s candy thermometer slowly crawl down towards your desired temperature, spoiling any chance that you may have had to put Miller Coors out of business.

The first, and some may say the most important, step to stopping the bacterial infection, is cooling your wort as quickly as possible and get into the fermenter.  We briefly touched on the inefficient water bath option, where you simply place your pot into a basin of ice cold water in hopes of cooling the wort down to where you need it to make your yeast happy.  The problem here is simply that it takes entirely too long to cool and get it protected in your fermenter.  I believe I stood for about 2 hours staring at the thermometer, willing it to move lower and lower.

Well, how can I cool my wort quickly and efficiently?  Great question!  You simply need a wort chiller.  Of course, because freedom demands choices, there are options here as well.  There are 3 main types of wort chillers that you need to decide between to best fit your needs.  Let’s discuss the immersion wort chiller, the counter flow wort chiller, and the plate chiller.

The immersion wort chiller is a simple concept of placing a coil of metal, either stainless or copper, tubing down inside your brew pot full of hot wort and running cold water through the tubing to cool the wort from the inside out.  The flow of cold water through the tubing transfers the heat from the wort to the cold water, which flows out the other end of the tubing.  Some suggest using a pool of ice water supply into the tubing with a pump to cause greater heat transfer.  Otherwise you may experience a longer, but much less than the water bath, wait time depending on your incoming water temperature.  One way around this is to use a longer length of tubing to allow for greater surface area for the heat transfer to occur.

The next option is the counter-flow wort chiller.  We are still using cold water to cool the wort but using it much more efficiently.  We are still using the coil of tubing but this time the wort flows through the tubing while the cold water flow in the opposite direction around the tubing through a hose. The water flowing through the hose in the opposite direction of the hot wort in the tube is much more efficient and quicker than the simple immersion chiller.

Our last option to discuss is the plate chiller. It is a fairly simple concept, hot wort flows into the chiller and through thin plates while cold water flows into the chiller across adjacent plates transferring the heat.  The heat transfer is very efficient and quick, much faster than the immersion and in some cases 3 times faster than the counter-flow.  Depending on your target temperature it could cool your wort in as little as 3 minutes.

The differences between the 3 types of chillers are not that drastic.  The shorter immersion chillers are cheaper, based solely on the cost of the material and the engineering to build it.  The longer immersion units are more expensive than their shorter siblings because we are now using double the material to build it.  The counter-flow model is more expensive than their short immersion cousins but is comparable in price to the longer immersion types.  The plate chillers can be the most expensive because of the material it takes to manufacture them.

The pros of the immersion chiller are faster cooling of your wort than a typical water bath.  The 25 foot version is much cheaper than a counter-flow chiller, typically about half the price, but the 50 foot version can be about twice that.  It will cool your wort in about 30-45 minutes.  The cons are that you will now have to clean that sticky wort off of all the bends and creases of that tubing.  The short version may require relatively longer cooling times depending on your inlet water temperature.

The pros of the counter-flow chiller is that it will cool your wort in the amount of time it takes to drain your pot into the fermenter, average time is about 10-15 minutes.  You do not have to worry about cleaning the entire exterior of the tubing since it is not immersed in the wort.  The cons start with the price.  It can be as much as twice as the 25 foot model immersion chiller. 

The pros of the plate chiller are its speed and efficiency in cooling your wort.  The cons are the price and much like the immersion is the cleaning process.  The chore of cleaning a plate chiller can be daunting when you consider that you are trying to clean between plates that you cannot see. 

Whichever direction you decide to go with a chiller, you will not be disappointed with the end product.  After all, we all love brewing beer, but to brew and then to have to dump an entire 5 gallon batch is heart breaking.  Your beer deserves the extra loving care of protecting it from bacterial invasion.