A Cooler Wort Cooler!
by Matthew Wilson
FEBRUARY 26, 2000: Albany, New York --
Recently, I made my sister a wort cooler since she said that her old one was leaking. A friend of mine had made me one for Christmas a while back and I wanted to see if there was anything that I could do to improve on the design.
My main concern was that I use a lot of water in cooling the wort. We live on a well, and incidentally, the pump was fried last summer. I don't think my wort cooling is related to the pump failure, but the less water I use the better. I looked around for another example of a wort cooler to see what else was out there. The one in the local supply store was similar to what I wanted to do, but cost 47$! I headed over to the local hardware store and picked up the following pieces:
- 15' of 1/2" coiled copper tubing
- 10' of 1/2" clear vinyl tubing
1 faucet adapter that can screw into the inside or outside of the faucet and then to a 3/8" hose
- 4" of 3/8" internal diameter hose
- 1 barb to connect the 3/8" ID hose to the 1/2" ID tubing
- 2 larger hose clamps
- 5 smaller hose clamps
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Uncoil the copper tubing so that it fits into your boiling pot. Arrange it so that the copper comes up out of the pot. Cut the vinyl tubing into two five foot lengths. You can make this shorter of course, but this will allow you to run the cooler even if your pot is not in the sink. Attach the tube to both ends of the coil and double clamp them.
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Attach the barb to one of the vinyl tubes, and clamp that. Attach the other end of the barb to the short hose (I assume you put the hose on the correct end of the barb) and clamp that. The last clamp will go from the hose to the faucet adapter. This will be the point that you break the system apart to attach the faucet adapter.
Remember to put the exhaust hose in the drain when you are running this. I think that's about it. Just make sure all of your connections fit before you exit the hardware store. The kicker with this cooler was that I cooled the wort down from boiling to 85 degrees in thirteen minutes! I guess all of that extra surface area makes a real difference. When I was using the other cooler I have, I could not even touch the exhaust water, with this one, the water was flowing so quickly that the exhaust barely got hot.
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