Immersion, Plate or Counter Flow Chiller! Review which is BEST?
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- Опубліковано 22 лют 2024
- Immersion coil, vs plate chiller, vs counterflow. Which is best? We finally put it to the test to see which has the best cooling power, discuss the pros and cons of each, and tell you which (in our opinion) is best for home brewers!
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Great vlog.
I used my IC yesterday on a hot day in Liverpool 22c, from boiling to pitching temp it took 45mins which is fine for me.
Liverpool Sydney or Liverpool UK? Haha
I've been putting my immersion chiller into a bucket of ice and doing single pass through it straight to the fermenter. Has been working a treat.
That is really smart!
Yeah great call on a hot summer day! Almost turning that immersion into a counterflow
Very interesting again. I use an immersion chiller but would like to give one of the other units ago at some point. Enjoyed that again cheers lads 👍🍻
Cheers mate, when in doubt buy more brew toys! 😂
I use a stainless-steel paint stirrer and cordless drill with the immersion chiller to continuously circulate wort. 10-15 mins to pitching temp with NSW water temps.
Yeah and would get a solid amount of dissolved oxygen into the wort while ur at it!
Hello, I'm living in Québec Canada, and here the water is so cold that I can get my water down to 9°c even in summer using à counterflow chiller ! So I can get my wort directly from my Grainfather to my fermenter really quickly. Thanks for your videos, you did a super job with interresting informations !
Cheers man! I’m jealous of your ground water temp! Haha
Just something of note for the experiment. The immersion chiller has the most surface area in contact with the entire wort, so it will have a dramatic decrease to temperature but will taper off over time. It takes time for the counter flow/plate chiller to decrease temperature when recirculating back into the kettle. If you were to test them from taking 100° down to 20° with everything else being the same, i think you would have a much different result, in my opinion. Most likey the immersion in last, counter flow 2nd, and plate chiller in 1st.
Yeah that’s very true, it’s not a perfect experiment but interesting to compare. Because CF and Plates are often used for single pass as well, not really for chilling a whole batch like that, so it’s a little tricky to do a direct comparison to the IC
@flyingwombattv that is very true; hard to compare when they are so different. Also, I wonder which one uses less water or if it is about the same. Like with many things in brewing; there is no one way or a right way. Cheers and brew on and keep up the content.
Hi Mate.
What I do, and imho it best of all worlds with my BZ65 setup.
I use both the coil and the CF/Coolossus.
Water goes -> outlet -> CF -> Immersion -> Spargewater heater (to have hot water to clean stuff with).
Wort goes at this point thru the CF and back into the BZ
This knocks 50-55l of wort down into the 60s (c) in 2 minutes, and the sparge heater is full.
The next 2 minutes i spend hoseing off the hop spider, the grain basket, etc, and the semi-hot exit-water is great at this :D
Now im into the 30s somewhere, and i CF from the BZ into the fermenter, and i can just keep the CF cooling trickle at about 3-4l/minute, and its at around 16-18c pitch temp.
That’s actually brilliant! A bit of work but sounds well worth it for the knock down piwer
I like the effort you put into it.
If you would like to do another experiment, I definitely would like to see a scenario which would be more alike real life. Consider for example that you would like to transfer the wort to the fermenter at 22 degrees. How much time and water would it take for each chiller to take the wort from boiling (ok let's say 95 degrees) to 22 degrees, no recirculation, just restriction of the flow of the wort on the output side of the chiller.
Yeah I did think about that after, it would be far more realistic, but the point of this one was really just to see which had the most knock down power. That being said future experiment to make it more real is defs doable
As you stated in your conclusion, there is an issue here with the comparison in that the btus/hr rating of each of the three are much different (along with the designed flow rates). If you had equally btu/hr sized exchangers it would be interesting to see the cost /performance metrics. Also, for the counter flow and plate exchangers, it's important to insulate them - otherwise you are reducing their effectiveness.
Yeah absolutely agree, unfortunately I could only test what I had on hand but if we buy new chillers in future I’m happy to give it another crack
Really cool video, I am a big fan of the experimental side of brewing. It would be difficult but interesting to see time to pitch and water usage, as you know in Australia water is definitely something to keep in mind. I use an immersion chiller but I also use the bucket blaster pump to pull water from my pool, I am terrified I'll make a beer and dump a bunch of chlorinated human soup into it but so far the brass hose adapters I've added to the chiller have held up perfectly. I have nothing but personal, unmeasured observation (very sciency, I know) but I feel the temp drop slows the closer to pitching temp the wort gets.
Oh yeah it for sure does, that’s just basic thermodynamics, the smaller the differential between the two temps the lesser the change over time, but that’s where plate or counterflows have an advantage, you can essentially once the wort is cold enough, pass it through the chiller and straight into the fermenter (unlike immersion where the whole thing must be cooled down)
@@flyingwombattv absolutely. Cool video, definitely surprising results!
A real test would be to see which gets to pitching temps fastest.
Yeah as I said to one of the other comments, we thought about going right down to pitching, but what we noticed while measuring was the temp vs time relationship appeared to be near enough to linear to make not a lot of difference between the chillers. That being said maybe something does happen at low temps we are unaware of, but it’s important to keep in mind something like a plate or CF is typically intended to be used for single pass from boiler to fermenter, so it seemed to us going from boil to pitch wasn’t the fairest comparison between the 3
I agree that size matters however, so does price. I would imagine a more realistic comparison would be to test from 80c down to pitching temperature, that would be more practical for home brewers.
Perhaps something to consider in a future video? This video is a good reference though.
I agree we thought about going right down to pitching, but what we noticed while measuring was the temp vs time relationship appeared to be near enough to linear to make not a lot of difference between the chillers. That being said maybe something does happen at low temps we are unaware of, but it’s important to keep in mind something like a plate or CF is typically intended to be used for single pass from boiler to fermenter, so it seemed to us going from boil to pitch wasn’t the fairest comparison between the 3
do you have a pump and chilled water running through the plate/immersion chiller?
Yup, all the chillers were hooked up to the same water source, a very big rain water tank
It would be interesting to know hat was the ambient temperature of the air in the room, and of the cooling water. If you did the immersion chiller first in the morning then it would have the double effect of benefiting from cool ambient temperature and water
True, but the water and ambient temp was the same for each unit so it’s not really a variable that would affect the results
plate chiller all the way for me, slow down flow and go direct to fermenter
I’m a big fan but for us our ground water never seems to be cold enough to get us a single pass!
@@flyingwombattv that's why I slow down the wort flow but keep a decent water flow, more contact = colder temp, it's not cold enough to pitch yeast but cold enough to not damage fermenter
Hard to keep an immersion sanitary? Just put it in the last 5 mins of a boil after a rinse off from the previous brew... Ain't nothing surviving 100c at 5 mins....
I agree you’ll kill off just about anything, but in my own personal experience, there always seems to be a bit of residue from the previous batch hugging the metal that I’m just not a fan of reintroducing to the new brew
@@flyingwombattv sure, but if I've learned anything from brewing it's you could put a hot dog in your brew and you even knowing it's there and others not knowing it's there probably wouldn't be able to taste and notice it's there 😂
I have an immersion chiller but never use it, I just hot cube, leave overnight on my workbench & transfer to the All Rounder the next day.
Yeah defs easier! Do you adjust your recipe to account for the extra hot contact with the hops?
@@flyingwombattv Do you know I have never thought of doing that, the brews always seem to come out fine though & not too bitter.
Ha crazy I think the IC is the easiest to use and easiest to clean and the plate chiller is a pain to try to clean!
Yeah all comes down to how you clean as well though, before I used to use caustics and strong acids the plate would’ve been a nightmare tbh, but now I do a lot of CIP with very strong chemicals at high temp and it just blasts through trub!
IC for me. I don’t like the idea of the other two sitting around wet for 3-4 weeks between brew days. They could easily have all sorts of nasties growing in them.
I feel you are just suffering out of sight out of mind bias… have you ever disassembled your plate chiller and checked out what crud is left in there or taken a pinhole camera into the cfc to see how much crud actually stays or grows in there?
With a standard immersion chiller, such as the one that comes with Brewzilla, I normally take 45-60 minutes to get down to pitching temp (68F). This includes using what I call the ice down, double immersion process where you run the tap water through a second immersion chiller sitting in a cooler with a bag of ice to really cool the water even more before it passes through the chiller that is in the boil kettle. I just upgraded to a counter flow chiller in that same process with no extra ice took less than 10 minutes. I really think these results are misleading when it comes to getting wort down to pitching temperature.
Some here. Moved to counter flow and do a recirculate chilling down to about 100 - 120 F which takes about 5 - 10 min and then I do single pass into the fermenter. Takes longer to setup and break down than an immersion chiller but immersion would stall out about 90 degrees in my case.
@@RichardDePas exactly, getting from 90 to 68F took me forever! Stalling is the word.
Yeah good call, honestly we are similar, we recirculate the wort for about 5 mins to cool the whole mass down below issomerisation temp for the hops then do single pass
Drop the plate chiller in bucket of cold water/ice and it is a monster at chilling.
Yeah I may need to give that a crack next brewday
UK
Cheers from across the pond then!