Wort Chillin', Rhyme Illin', Can't Shake that West Coast Fillin'

So I built a wort chiller.


That doesn't mean I can freeze warts off at home. Gross. It means that I can cool down big pots of boiling wort, which is kind of like proto-beer. It's beer that has all the barley and hops and such mixed in, but hasn't yet had any yeast added. And it needs to be cooled off, like, right now.

That's where my wort chiller comes in. It carries heat away from the wort swiftly, as if the very hounds of Mordor were at its back. But, you know... with thermodynamics and stuff. No hounds were harmed.

One thing I like about the way I built Chilla v1.0. The first is that the on/off valve is very accessible. It's right up there with the main bits of the chiller, meaning I don't have to get under the sink to turn it on and off, like with the Alpha designs.

Mostly, this was about me learning how some basic plumbing works. I've never really done any, so I didn't know what anything was called, or even what was available at my local home improvement big box. The first thing I tried was one of those self-tapping thingamajigs that you use to get a water line to your ice maker. It was immediately clear that this was a terrible place to have the on/off switch for the chiller.

It became especially clear when I accidentally twisted the self-tapping thingy out of the pressurized line and sprayed water all over myself. Dammit.

So I got a new heavy duty 3/8" line (with a 1/2" nut up top, of course), and a nice little 3/8"x3/8"x1/4" adapter that I could screw a 1/4" line directly onto. Real easy, low leaking risk. Of course, you can see the leak here left over from my troubleshooting.



Then it was mostly just learning how to put things together so they worked. Here's a quick lesson.
In case you're not the Rain Man, here's that in English. First, we need names for those things - From the left, I'm going to call them A, B, and C, because I can't think of any names that are kid-friendly right now.

1. So you insert B into C. The flat side of the flare goes in first.
2. Put your tube into B+C contraption. Put it in a good ways.
3. IF AND ONLY IF your tube is plastic, insert A all the way into the end of it. Otherwise, skip to 4.
4. Push the B+C piece almost to the end of the tube. If it's a plastic tube, this will be bloody difficult.
5. Insert into the appropriate threaded end (might be a union, or maybe an adapter, or whatever)
6. Tighten.
7. Turn on the water, realize you didn't tighten enough, turn the water off.
8. Tighten some more.

So anyways, there you go. If you can't figure out how to build a wort chiller from the above, there's not much I can do for you.

Notes on how well it worked pending - I haven't tried it yet.