The Quick Chiller Method
Chill your wort in 15 minutes with an easy-to-make, double-coil immersion chiller. This is a quick do-it-yourself project that will give you cooling efficiency at less than half the cost of mail-order chillers. Go to your favorite home supplies store and, for about $20, purchase a 50-foot coil of 3/8-inch copper refrigerator tubing. In the same aisle you can also pick up two 4-foot sections of clear, flexible poly-tubing, two small stainless hose clamps, and an adapter for your kitchen faucet or garden hose (whichever is more appropriate). Once you get home, start coiling one end of the copper tubing around the bottom of your five-gallon bottling bucket. The other half of the tubing can be coiled around something with a smaller diameter, say, a coffee can (this will be the inside coil). Connect the poly-tubing to each end of your new copper chiller with the hose clamps and connect the faucet adapter to the free end of one of these sections. Make sure that your hose clamps are snug or you’ll have cold water shooting all over your kitchen walls (that never happened to me, of course).
— Andy Lowe, Vista, Calif.
If Only Mowing Were This Easy
I have garden-hose adapters on the input and output of my immersion chiller. I take the warmed water output of my immersion chiller and connect it to a garden sprinkler. Now, I water the garden and lawn while brewing! I find that the water is just warm by the time it comes out of the sprinkler, flies through the air, and hits the ground, so you don’t have to worry about cooking your grass.
— Bruce Wells, Scarsdale, N.Y.
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