Pump Stand in Action

Last week, we showed the stand I built to support both my pump and my plate chiller during the brew session. This week, I shot some footage of the whole thing in action during a German Hefeweizen brew session.

I had some trouble initially figuring out the best way to plumb the chiller. Primarily, I had issue plumbing to the water supply for chilling. Once I had that figured out, I felt like the stand was pretty functional. The height works well for priming the pump. The pump actually sits a few inches below the valves on my vessels. This placement allows for some inherent downward gravity flow to the pump when I am getting things started so priming worked very well in this configuration.

The pump is only 8-10 inches above the chiller which saves a bit of tubing when going pump to chiller. I only used a 20 inch length to loop up to the chiller. I am a bit concerned about how the chiller and the tubing is over the electronics. I don’t expect it to be a major problem during brewing, however the cleaning phase involves moving hoses and there is a lot of dripping near the pump.

I had covered the pump with a plastic bag, just in case. At the end of my latest session, the pump seemed really hot and I wasn’t sure if its because the bag is trapping hot air at the pump or not. I can’t say I have ever felt the pump after a brew session so it might naturally run that hot.

Lastly, which is really the point of this post, is how well did it chill? Well, I chilled 5.5 gallons for wort from boiling to about 85 degrees fahrenheit in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this is still a good 20 degrees above my preferred pitch temperature. To remedy this issue, there are two solutions: Run the wort through slower with the chill water at near full blast to maximize heat liberation from the wort. The second solution is to run the chiller in a recirculation loop into the kettle again where I would need to monitor the wort temperature until I am ready to fill up the fermentor. The latter method allows me to hit my temperature prior to the fermentor, but it’s likely to take more time than just running off to the fermentor.

Time will tell and the learning curve has begun. More videos to come as I continue to experiment and learn the best way to work the Shirron chiller into my work flow.

CHEERS