In homebrewing the time it takes your boiling wort to chill down to a temperature safe for pitching your yeast is a time of great danger.  Wort is a nice warm medium loaded with sugar.  It’s the perfect place for nasty, foul tasting bacteria to flourish.  The longer your wort hangs in the danger zone the more likely you’re going to have an infected sour mess on your hands.

A wort chiller is essential for successful homebrewing.  My chiller is an immersion design that is dropped right into the steaming hot wort.  It’s made of copper and has as connector at each end for water supply and drainage.  A chiller does a good job of taking the temperature of your wort down close to groundwater temps.  On it’s own it just isn’t fast enough.

My first batch of homebrew took and hour and a half to drop from over 200 degrees Fahrenheit at a full boil to a pitchable temp of 75 degrees Fahrenheit.  That was the most apprehensive ninety minutes I’ve had in a while.  With the drainage from my chiller just running into the yard I wasted a huge amount of water too.  That process had to be revamped.

After some research on the net I put together a system that uses a cooler full of ice water and an immersable sump pump to push freezing cold water through my chiller.  I run the drainage line back into the cooler and don’t waste any water either.  With this setup I can get my wort down to 75 degrees Fahrenheit in 24 minutes…result!  I highly recommend a cooling system like this to any homebrewer.

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