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Should I use a wort chiller, and what are the advantages of doing so?

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4 Answers

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You should if you can. The advantages are a faster brew-day, a shorter window of potential wort contamination, and a better cold break. (Depending on the method, you might also get improved clarity due to whirlpooling trub and break material that you would then not siphon in the primary fermenter.

See How do you cool wort?

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A wort chiller is something you use to cool your hot wort to pitching temperature. A copper coil submersion chiller is a pretty common type of wort chiller for home brewers. In addition to what jsled mentioned for reasons of using one, it can also help reduce DMS buildup in your wort since it is still being produced at hot temperatures even though it's no escaping through steam.

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Can you explain DMS? – rjstelling Jan 10 '11 at 17:51
It's an off flavor that tastes similar to cooked vegetables. – PMV Jan 10 '11 at 18:41
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DMS stands for Dimethylsulfide. Its best described as cooked corn or cabbage smell. It gets boiled off during the brew process. As the temp drops DMS can still be formed at high enough temps. The importance of chilling quickly is to prevent more DMS from forming once the boil stops, i.e. you aren't driving off DMS anymore. A wort chiller helps speed chilling and hence DMS accumulating in the wort. – brewchez Jan 10 '11 at 20:01
up vote 4 down vote

It's basically coiled copper tubing you run cold water through to help cool your wort faster. I built the one I use. Anybody that's run an old musclecar would have recognized it as something akin to a "cool can". I have brass fittings at each end of the coil that attach to hoses. One I affix to my tap, the other drains into the sink.

You prepare your wort as usual, then at the final few minutes of boiling, drop the coil in. This helps sanitize it, but obviously it should be cleaned beforehand. When you've turned off the heat, you start running the water which goes through the coils and down the drain. The reasons/benefits were summed up nicely in jsled's post.

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Interesting. I never thought of putting it in while it was still boiling. I always just Starsan'd it – Joe Philllips Jan 13 '11 at 16:17
When I first did it, I wondered if it would make the beer taste copper-y. Fortunately it didn't, and I found out it was the same way a friend of mine did it. Works well, just gotta make sure you give some room between the wort and where the plastic hoses connect. Don't want that getting too hot. :O – N8s Jan 31 '11 at 20:27
up vote 2 down vote

The advantages of chilling your wort is to be able to pitch your yeast more quickly, thus shortening your brew day. Also, your wort is susceptible to bacterial infection if there is no competing yeast. There are many people, especially those down under, that have no problem letting wort cool in it's own sweet time, but it seems that most brewers here are interested in chilling quickly.

There are two kinds of chiller:

  • Immersion Chiller - A coil, typically made of copper, where cooling water flows. This picks up heat from the wort and carries it away.
  • Heat Exchanger Chiller (reverse flow chiller) - Can be a plate chiller or a tube inside a tube. The cooling water flows in the opposite direction as the wort, so the coldest chilling water exchanges heat with the coldest wort.

Immersion chillers are the simplest type of chiller. These will be much more effective if they are agitated during chilling (this prevents a layer of cool wort from staying next to the coil).

The heat exchangers can be used in a single pass, where the wort goes through once, and into the fermentation vessel, or can be used in a recirculating mode (needs a food-grade pump) where the wort is returned to the boil kettle. In the single pass configuration, the cold break ends-up in the fermentation vessel, but has the advantage of not requiring a lot of attention (no agitation), and no pump (if your burner is up high enough for gravity to allow the kettle to drain into the fermentation vessel.

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