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Some BBTs not cooling. Insight??

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  • Some BBTs not cooling. Insight??

    I have a strange problem. I have a beer in BBT that won't cool all the way. The last beer in the same tank (with the glycol at the same temp; -4c) held perfectly at 1c. This one wouldn't go below 2.6 on the probe when set to 1, and as I force carbed it through the stone it rose to 2.9 and won't budge from there. A quick check of the actual beer temp confirms that it's around there. I'd not had this problem before until last week when a different beer in a different BBT wouldn't go below 2.5 or so, also set to 1. That was an imperial stout with 1.029 FG, this is a bone dry saison at 1.000. Any insight into this would be appreciated! I'm worried about trying to counter-pressure bottle this at 3 degrees and just over 3 vol CO2, when I would normally try to drop it to 0.5 or so.
    Thanks!

  • #2
    I have sen this a couple of times, and what usually happened to me was I cooled the beer to fast and got ice formed on the inside of the tank where the cooling jackets are. It acts a an insulator and will not allow the beer to get any colder. It has only happen to me on beers that were less that 6% abv.

    Jim Lieb

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    • #3
      Hi Jim,
      That's a reasonable hypothesis. I did try to cool these both very quickly. I guess I'll switch off the glycol for a day and see if it helps
      Thanks!
      Stephen

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      • #4
        -4 C is around 24.5 F. I think it's likely that you are forming ice on the jackets with your glycol being that cold. We run ours at 27 F in the summer and 28 F in the winter.

        Also, you may be getting a thermal inversion. Does adding CO2 through the carb stone to circulate the beer have any effect on the temp?
        Linus Hall
        Yazoo Brewing
        Nashville, TN
        www.yazoobrew.com

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        • #5
          Hi Linus, Thanks for the reply. No, I carbonated the beer fully to 3+ vol through the stone after the temperature stalled out, and that had almost no effect on the temperature. It sounds like i'm probably icing up.
          Cheers
          Stephen
          Brouwerij de Kromme Haring
          Utrecht NL

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          • #6
            Setting your glycol between -2 and -3 C will help prevent icing, and you'll likely see a decrease in your electric bill since your chiller will be running within its design parameters.

            Icing will stop cooling very effectively.

            It can also pose a safety hazard. We have two tall, skinny 35 bbl ferms. One day, one of the brewers went to clean one. He left the manway door open and inside the ferm. Hearing a very loud crash, he took a look at the ferm--the ice jacket inside, from the top glycol jacket, had cut loose from the ferm walls and crashed down with enough force to break the arm of the manway door! I hate to think what would have happened had he decided to stick his head inside to take a look at that instant!
            Timm Turrentine

            Brewerywright,
            Terminal Gravity Brewing,
            Enterprise. Oregon.

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            • #7
              Hi Timm,
              Thanks for the sound advice and warning!
              Stephen

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              • #8
                (Interesting?) Followup to this thread. I packaged the beer, bottling was a PIA but we got through it. I opened the BBT immediately after finishing to see what was going on inside. It was just empty, with the usual bit of residue at the initial fill level. Not a hint of ice anywhere! Not even a frost on the higher bit of the cooling jacket.

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                • #9
                  probably silly question, but how big is the tank and how much beer is in it? 9 times out of 10 when the brewers come to me and say "tank x isn't chilling properly" they don't have enough beer in it to cover any/all of the jackets. It sounds simple, but if you package an 80 bbl brite and put the first 60 into cans, then leave the last 20 for kegs the next morning, depending on the location of your jackets, you might not have enough (or any) coverage.

                  Sometimes it's poor tank design too, we have a 40 bbl brite with no bottom dish jacket, and the bottom sidewall jacket is relatively high, like above the 10 bbl mark. Beer will actually start to noticeably warm by the end of a packaging run...

                  If the tanks are full and it's not that, I'd start checking for proper flow through the problematic tanks. We've had issues where the glycol was plenty cold, but flow issues (easily corrected sometimes!) were preventing tanks from doing their thing.

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                  • #10
                    Hi Glenn, Never a silly question. The BBTs are 12HL (actual vol around 1350L). I can't see the actual glycol jacket as the main body and bottoms are insulated, so I'm kind of guessing what its range is. If the glycol jacket is only a ring from the level of the inlet to the level of the outlet then it could possibly only cover the (very approximately) 550-1050L range. In the past I've been able to cool 500L beer in these, so it seems likely that the range is wider than that, but not sure to what extent. I think I'll have to run the glycol on an empty tank briefly and see where the condensation forms. Actually, (piecing this together in real time) I remember one of these beers was at a low volume in the BBT when I had the cooling problem... looks from the bottling records that it was around 450L, so we may have just found the lower edge of the glycol jacket!

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