DIY : Adding A Whirlpool Return To An Immersion Chiller

What better to do over the winter when it's just too damn cold to brew outside than build some shit to make brewing this summer better?

I inherited an immersion chiller at the beginning of last summer and loved the step out to it from my ghetto-built homemade version. It's pretty effective at dropping the wort from boil to about 140 in a pretty short period of time.

However, after reading about Jamil's whirlflow immersion chiller and the impact it has on both late hop character and DMS reduction, I decided to go for it. (The fact that the fiance and her mom gave me a Northern Brewer gift card to cover a march pump definitely helped...)

The design of the whirlpool arm is actually simple. It's all 1/2" copper with a 1/2" hose barb for the output from the march pump and a curved return section which runs along the inside of the coils.

Parts List:

• ~ 5' of 1/2" type L copper tubing
• 2x 90 degree 1/2" elbows
• 1x 45 degree 1/2" elbow
• 1x 1/2" tubing to 1/2" NPT female adaptor
• 1x 1/2" NPT to 1/2" barb

Assembly:

1. Use a standard conduit bender to create the gentle 90 degree curve which roughly matches the inside of the existing coils. Putting a 3/8" spring inside of it while bending helped to prevent kinks
2. Cut the rest of the pipe to size and dry fit everything together. Following the direction of water flow: 1/2" tubing to 1/2" NPT female adaptor <=> ~2" of pipe <=> 45 degree elbow <=> ~4" of pipe <=> 90 degree elbow <=> ~30" of pipe <=> 90 degree elbox <=> curved return
3. Test fit it in the existing chiller
4. Solder it all up
5. (TBD) Test it with the pump to ensure there aren't any leaks
6. (TBD) Solder it all together (or use hose clamps)
7. Make better beer!

The (almost) finished product is pictured here. The tape is just holding it all together until I can test it next week with my new pump...

The whole unit

The top of the return and the bend profile inside.

Inlet / Outlet detail

First Competition

Square Kegs (my local homebrew club) is running a startup competition later this month. I've never entered beer in one before, but was definitely inspired to do so by listening to Jamil Zainisheff talk about getting better by doing so on many episodes of brew strong. I also happen to think that some of the recent batches I've done with Jeremy are the best I've ever made, and absolutely would stand up against other homebrew.

So yesterday I stopped by BrewCamp to drop off six entries in total:

1. West Texas Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
2. Light Sweet Crude (Russian Imperial Stout, collaboration)
3. Citra IPA (American IPA, collaboration)
4. Beer Wench Lager (Oktoberfest, collaboration)
5. Yet Another Imperial IPA (Imperial IPA, collaboration, extract experiment)
6. Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout (Spice Beer, solo venture, extract experiment)

I'm pretty stoked to get some BJCP-certified feedback on all of the beers and potentially win a couple of categories!

Props to the competition's organizers - they had over 500 entries yesterday. I'm looking forward to the actual event.

I'll post the score sheets once I get them back.

Big, Medium and Small Porters at Revolution

The fiance and I went to dinner at Revolution last night with a couple of friends. I've been a big fan of their whole operation since trying their beer at a festival early on and the first time I ate there.

I'm a big fan of their Eugene Porter and it just so happened that they had two additional versions of it available last night. "Hugene" and "Weegene", first and second runnings off of the standard Eugene recipe. Eugene is a substantial beer already at 7%, so the Hugene was in fact "huge" at 10.6% and the Weegene was still a 4.7% beer.

We ordered a couple 4oz pours of Hugene after we'd finished with dinner and our server was nice enough to bring us some small samples of the Weegene as well. (And I still had a half glass or so of the standard Eugene.) It was definitely a unique opportunity to try a vertical sampling of different beers all created with the same grain bill.

The Hugene definitely had the hallmarks of a first running-only beer. Massive chocolate, raisin and roast flavors were supported by an appropriate amount of residual sweetness without any hot alcohols or heavy astringency. The Weegene had some of the some chocolate notes, but definitely showed more of the roast / astringency character to be expected from a sparge. Both were well-made beers, but the big version was excellent. I haven't had an Imperial Porter in the recent past, so I also appreciated the difference between that and an Imperial Stout. The highly roasted and grain bitterness character of the stout takes a back seat to the chocolate and dark fruit flavors in the porter, making for a very drinkable beer...

I love the Chicago beer scene.

Growlers Doing Double Duty

Both of those growlers were full of beer on New Year's Eve. Having been emptied, they were put to work containing blow off for the two batches brewed on the next two days... Local love to Half Acre.

Lakefront Brewery Tour

I'm a pretty lucky guy. I recently got engaged, and not only is my fiance fully supportive of my passion for brewing - one of the locations we're considering for our wedding is Lakefront Brewery up in Milwaukee. We'd heard a lot of great things from my family up there about both the tours and about a couple of weddings they'd gone to there.

So we headed up yesterday to both check it out, ask a few questions about the venue and go on the tour. We'll see how it plays out as a venue, but the tour itself is more appropriate for this post. I've only been on a couple of tours (Dogfish Head a.k.a. mecca and Goose Island) previously. This one was pretty standard fare in terms of walking through the brewery, seeing the pro gear and having a downright hilarious guide.

Now my fiance might call me a snob for this next comment, but the actual content of the tour was definitely geared towards the casual beer enthusiast. Don't get me wrong - it was still fun and pretty cool to see how they run their operation. I know I'm in a marginally tiny percentage of the overall population as far as brewing knowledge, but I love to learn more. (I definitely learned a few new things about Dogfish on their tour.)

If / when I bring the pipe dream of starting up a brewery to fruition, I think it'd be awesome to set up a small percentage of tours geared towards homebrewers or other enthusiasts who already have a decent understanding of the process and are interested in really learning about some of the differences in a pro setup.

Better Bottle Hack

After listening to many, many episodes of Can You Brew It on the brewing network, the standard volumes they use are a part of my process.

For a 60 minute boil:

• Mash and sparge to 7.2 gallons
• Boil down to 6 gallons
• Transfer 5.5 to the fermentor
• Finish with 5 gallons of clear, drinkable beer

Since none of my boil kettles have a sight glass on them, I decided to do something I'd been thinking about for a while. I measured out a half gallon of water, put the better bottle on a flat, level surface and started marking. After the first half gallon, I did full gallons up to 5.5. (It's actually a bit higher up in the Better Bottle than I thought it would've been. Regardless, after the massive blow-out I had earlier this year in a Russian Imperial Stout, I've started adding fermcap to my fermentation now as well.)

Here's the end result. It made it a whole lot easier to top a partial boil extract batch up to the correct volume at the end of the process and should make it a hell of a lot easier to transfer out exactly five gallons of finished beer.

I could've gone with the fancy vinyl stickers I've seen elsewhere, but a sharpie seems to have worked just fine this time around.

Extract Process (Revisited) Part II

So what better way to ring in the new year than by brewing a couple batches of beer?

As I mentioned in a prior post, I had been planning on doing a couple of extract batches this winter to try to stay out of the bitter Chicago cold but keep up on brewing.

I wrote up my process here ahead of time, which ended up working relatively well. Unfortunately, it's been quite a while since I brewed inside and I ran in to a couple of trouble spots on the first batch. (Imperial IPA from Brewing Classic Styles)

Firstly, I did a full 6.5 gallon boil instead of the 3 gallon boils I used to do on the stove. I remember reading somewhere that natural gas has significantly less heat energy than propane, but didn't really take that to heart. It took almost two hours to get it up to boiling, with two burners on my stove at full blast. That sucked.

Secondly, the cooling stick I bought ended up barely having any effect on the temperature of the wort at all... I probably should have thought out the physics on that one. 1 gallon of frozen water really doesn't have much of an impact on 6 gallons of boiling hot, sugar laden wort. It got the wort down to about 165 in 30 minutes. Not so good either.

All in all, six hours start to finish on an extract batch is pretty weak in my opinion.

So, I adjusted for those issues on the second batch of the long weekend. (Mexican Hot Chocolate Stout - recipe to follow.)

I did a 3 gallon boil, which made an enormous difference in the time to get the water up to temp. After finishing my boil, I used an old trick Alton Brown recommended on his episode of Good Eats about brewing. Dump a 7lb bag of ice plus a gallon of near-freezing distilled water into your wort as soon as you kill the heat. That alone dropped the three gallons of wort to 115F in about 3 minutes.

Three hours start to finish on the second batch. That's more like what I expect from extract brewing!