John Guest Manufacturers Website

[Vossy1]

http://www.johnguest.co.uk/range_spec.asp?a=PIPM

[The Cardinal]

I'll check it out tomorow.

[SteveD]

I did a gig tonight and they gave us the bar cellar as a changing room. Apart from being cold, it was great to see a professional dispense set up. The pipework was phenomenal and all on 3/8" pipe and JG fittings. I crave one of their heavy duty beer chillers - but for chilling cooling water

[SteveD]

I did a gig tonight and they gave us the bar cellar as a changing room. Apart from being cold, it was great to see a professional dispense set up. The pipework was phenomenal and all on 3/8" pipe and JG fittings. I crave one of their heavy duty beer chillers - but for chilling cooling water

I found with the usual flow rate through my immersion, the water doesn't remain in the cooling coil long enough to get cold enough to make an appreciable difference to the cooling rate.

There are 3 cooling coils in the particular chiller I use so the next step would be to hook them all up in series to see if that makes a difference but running an flash chiller is quite an expensive way to chill wort.

If you are interested in one of those flash chillers recon' ones are available here http://www.beer-coolers.co.uk/index.html but they are a little pricey.

Thanks for the info Chris, but I'm not really serious about getting one of those - just general lust. If I want to cool mains water I chuck a bag of ice or a couple of pre-frozen pet bottles of water into my mashtun, fill with water, chuck in my second IC and prechill the water through that. Works ok. I did that on the 'Old Precipitation' Brewday. There's a pic on that thread.

It's interesting you say the machine doesn't cool the water enough to make a difference to the performance of an IC. I suppose it's only dropping it a few degrees anyway. Beer in a pub cellar if going to be at 11-13c, and the flash chiller might take it down another 5c or so. However hooking up 3 coils in series is going to have a much bigger effect, I'd guess.

[SteveD]

Ahhh I see. Makes sense. Could you not just turn the tap down a bit? I run water through my IC at a fairly leisurely rate to give it time to pick up heat

[SteveD]

Ahhh I see. Makes sense. Could you not just turn the tap down a bit? I run water through my IC at a fairly leisurely rate to give it time to pick up heat

I throttled it back to what I guestimated would be the bare minimum rate for efficient cooling but you need certain flow rate through the IC for efficient heat exchange, it would probably take a few attempts to get it right but considering I barely if at all made a dent into my usual cooling time I can't see one of these units making a worthwhile difference.

I ought to try it with my plate chiller but through laziness I haven't even tested that out yet

Yep, there's a hundred quid or more. Not worth having IMO. I got a plate chiller recently, also needs testing. Lager would be a good candidate.

[SteveD]

The flash chillers main job is to cool my fermenter anyway.

Got a flash fridge for that

[SteveD]

I need to be able to keep the fermenter on the counter top as my back is to knackered to lift a 25l fermenter so a fridge isn't an option unless I ferment in a pressure vessel and rack under co2 pressure rather than gravity.

That's a pisser I've had spells of bad back including strained ligaments, but nothing chronic. It's enough though to get a taste of what a long term bad back would be like.