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Homemade glycol style chiller

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  • Homemade glycol style chiller

    Bear with me probrewers, I'm working something through in my head and need some guidance and your collective years of experience.

    So we have a 10bbl brewhouse with 2 10bbl FV and 1 BBT. very small. We are building it out right now and of course cost is an issue.
    Problem: I cant seem to find a decent used chiller on the market.
    Solution: built a cold water chiller???

    I was thinking of getting a 55 gallon ss container, filling with water and placing it inside my walk in cooler. then using a sump pump to pump this cold water to FV jackets to keep temps at proper temps.
    We current bottle AND keg condition so we only ever get our kegs down to 50F, which i would think would be possible with walk in cooler temps.
    I'm thinking in a few years (or preferable or months), when we are brewing at the new place, that we after we add tanks, it would be easy to drain jackets and get a real chiller in line...
    Any thoughts??
    Our bbt can get up top 25psi so we may even be able to carb via carb stone at 50F....

    Thanks for the years of guidance.
    Jason

  • #2
    Doing it monk style

    I believe Chimay (or maybe it was a different Trappist monastery) uses well water to keep their beers from fermenting too warm. So, it is done, but it is not efficient. I think that you'll end up either overtaxing your walk-in (assuming that you can chill 55 gallons of water quickly), or more likely you'll never get water to 50F and your beers won't ever get cold. The only reason that it works for the monks is that they have a crap ton of pre-chilled ground water at their disposal, and therefore have sufficient chilling capacity to handle things. I'm pretty sure that 55 gallons will be too little, unless you add a chiller somewhere in between the jackets and the cooler, but then you might as well get the glycol.

    Perhaps a better bet would be to look at using your HX to transfer beer from tank to tank, and then find some way to keep your BBT cold. That's just a thought.

    Good luck,

    Bill

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    • #3
      So you are saying use the chilled water to keep temps in FV range and then using that cold water to heat exchange beer to a cold BBT?
      Our BBT is not jacketed so it will be in cold room anyways.
      Intrigued.
      Thanks for the advice.
      jason

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      • #4
        Idea -

        There's always the 'used dairy equipment route' - one more piece of equipment to procure and HVAC unit to maintain, but go with me for a second...

        If you have the space, you could get an old, horizontal bulk dairy tank. Fill the tank with water, and let the dairy tank's chiller get your process water down (I seem to recall most older dairy tanks are automatically set at 40 F). Then, as you suggested, sump pump through the jackets.

        Any ideas (other than the obvious inefficiency) that would be prohibitive?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by kyle.carbaugh
          There's always the 'used dairy equipment route' - one more piece of equipment to procure and HVAC unit to maintain, but go with me for a second...

          If you have the space, you could get an old, horizontal bulk dairy tank. Fill the tank with water, and let the dairy tank's chiller get your process water down (I seem to recall most older dairy tanks are automatically set at 40 F). Then, as you suggested, sump pump through the jackets.

          Any ideas (other than the obvious inefficiency) that would be prohibitive?
          Still spending $3-5K, Ill tell you now used dairy equipment is expensive too, stainless is stainless. If all you have is the (2) 10 bbl tanks just use a small portable style chiller,



          Get the dual pump unit, run a send and return to each tank and call it a day, just wire the pump to line voltage controllers, like a love tc, and have that connected to the thermocouple on the tank. Make sure you you cycle the tank jackets full of glycol and then top off your reservoir. Maybe not the most powerful but it will work, just takes a bit longer to crash. You wont loose hair over it and constantly dealing with a red herring.
          Last edited by South County; 03-31-2011, 05:31 PM.

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