Wort Cooling

[bandicoot]

Hi I'm in the process of starting up a brewery and are after some thoughts on cooling. We are looking at using 660 gallons of 38F water to chill 265 gallons of wort from 212F to 64F using a plate heat exchanger. Any comments would be appreciated.

Cheers

[Scott M]

If I read you correctly, you are chilling water in a fermentation or bright tank with your glycol chiller to 38^oF and using that in a single pass to chill your wort. Why not set up a loop back to your FV or Bright tank and recirculate your chilled water back to the source with your glycol loop running wide open? Heat energy is heat energy and in this manner there is no water waste. Use that 660 gallons for CIP or brewery wash down post brew.

[bandicoot]

If I read you correctly, you are chilling water in a fermentation or bright tank with your glycol chiller to 38^oF and using that in a single pass to chill your wort. Why not set up a loop back to your FV or Bright tank and recirculate your chilled water back to the source with your glycol loop running wide open? Heat energy is heat energy and in this manner there is no water waste. Use that 660 gallons for CIP or brewery wash down post brew.

Thanks for your reply. We are thinking of chilling the water in a old vat using a refrigeration unit. Not too sure what you mean by recirculating back to the source, I may have misunderstood what you meant. I am thinking that once the water has gone through the chiller it will be quite hot, if we recirculate that back into the chilled water tank it wont stay cold for long. I don't thing the refridgeration unit would keep up. We will be able to store some of the heated water for CIP in the lauter tun and also in the hot liqour vessel. I guess I am hoping that the calculations are on the mark and it will be enough chilled water to chill the wort.

[Scott M]

Depending on the efficiency of your heat exchanger you could see returns to your chilled tank as warm as 70 to 80^o F. The size of your chiller and its ability to cool the recirculated water re-introduced into your tank would determine whether this would work.

I suggest you produce 265 gallons of hot 212^o F water and test the theory before trying it on a production run of wort. Then you will know.

[revolutioned]

Twice the size

You will have to size your cold liquor tank to the size of your batches. The cold liquor tank should be cooled by your glycol system before you knock out. We have a valve on our plate chiller that allows us to use direct glycol chilling on hot days when the cold liquor tank cant keep up. If I remember correctly the cold liquor tank should be twice the size of the batch that your brewing, so your tank should be at least 1200-1300 gallons to insure that you dont put too much strain on your chiller.

[CPESystems]

Better and bigger heat exchanger

Why not size your heat exchange to use less water? With a few more plates in the heat exchanger to can get the water coming out a reasonable hot temperature (175 F) that you can put straight in to your HLT and you would use less the 300 gallons per run.