Different Types of Wort Chillers

The larger than normal More Beer catalog came in the mail today and I have to applaud the information provided about wort chillers.

As a beginner homebrewer, I didn’t know much about this piece of equipment and the detail provided in the typical homebrewing product catalog was limited.

The descriptions of the wort chillers pointed out what volume of beer it could chill, how fast it could chill it, and a little bit about how it worked.

Of the three bits of information that were presented, the chill speed was the one that stuck out. If you could get your wort cooled to fermentation temperatures in a few minutes with a plate chiller rather than over a half hour with an immersion chiller, why wouldn’t you get a plate chiller?

Well, the price was a deterrent since most of them were close to 200 dollars or more. Moreover, I didn’t know how they would work. How would you get wort into them?

What I was looking for was a thorough write up of the different types of wort chillers including counterflow ones as well. There have been articles in BYO but for me, this is the first time I have seen a well written section right alongside products that you could purchase as a next step.

The biggest distinction between using an immersion chiller and any other kind is having an electric pump to move your wort from place to place. If you haven’t made that leap as a homebrewer (which I have not), you have no need for any other wort chiller except for the ones that you immerse inside your wort before the boil has ended.

For a counterflow or a plate chiller, you have to be able to pump wort out of your kettle and into your fermenter.

Now that I have made the decision of what chiller to buy easy, are you interested in knowing more about pumps? Me too. I will follow up with another post.