Fittings for Shirron Plate Chiller

I have been using my Shirron plate chiller for only two brews so far but I love it. It provides me with fast and easy chilling for my wort. However, making it work with my system wasn’t as clear cut as I first thought. This video shows how I finally got it all plumbed up. I put together the necessary fittings for Shirron plate chiller and share them here.

The wort-in and wort-out fittings are pretty easy to deal with. For me, I chose to simply use barbed fittings. Each one is a half inch barb on a half inch female pipe thread. I chose these one over quick disconnects because I would have needed to buy extra parts and I didn’t want to invest more money in parts.

(I’d rather be buying grain)

The water-out connection was also an easy choice since I like to collect some of the hot water coming out of the chiller in buckets. One bucket gets a PBW addition and the other one allows me to have a good quantity of clean hot water. I used these two buckets in the end as my cleaning solutions for the pump and now chiller. So for the water-out fitting, I used a half inch hose barb but this time with a 3/4 garden hose female fitting.

The real trick was the water-in fitting. All the fittings for the Shirron plate chiller are male. Your typical garden hose from the hose terminates as a male fitting as well. Getting these two male fittings to mate requires a coupling that I couldn’t find easily near me. Luckily, the solution was close at hand. I had an old section of garden hose that still had the stock female end on it. I purchased a second female end from the garden hose repair section of the local hardware store which gave me an adapter, if you will, to go from the male-ended garden hose to the male-ended water-in port on the chiller.

I find this setup works pretty well. It gives me an easy break point just a few feet back from the chiller which is good should I need to use the garden hose for something else in a hurry. I also use the short adapter hose in on the sink in my brew area for filling buckets that are on the floor.

Overall, these solutions are not as elegant as using cool disconnects but I had most of the pieces already and I didn’t need too spend much more money to put it together. I am glad I didn’t because I would not have had the cash to buy ingredients so that I could be brewing two beers using my Shirron Plate Chiller.

Cheers
BREW ON!