Brotherton Lad wrote:Depends how quickly you drink the beer, how big the coil is and what material it's made of. You could just end up with a warm fridge.
Yes, I agree. The main challenge is probably that the coil would be air cooled - air doesn't take all that much heat to warm up again and nor does it conduct heat very quickly so you'd need a long coil and/or slow beer movement through it. If the coil had the capacity of at least a pint and you only drew a pint infrequently perhaps okay, but if you had thirst on then the coil would have to be bigger/longer etc. so that the beer stays long enough in the fridge to chill. With some friends round for a session you could end up needing a coil the size of a cornie...
Guess you could try it with a jug of water about the capacity of your proposed coil; see how long it takes your fridge to cool it and work out if you drink more than that in the same time. (obviously, start with water the same sort of temp as your cornie - or else use beer from the cornie instead and then drink it afterwards!). The coil should be a bit more efficient than the jug as it has more surface area per unit volume, but it'll give you an idea - or if you wanted it to be more closely comparable maybe try a baking tray instead of the jug or something else with a large area.
If its not going to chill fast enough, you could try surrounding the coil with something that has more specific heat capacity, i.e. that would chill gradually but also take quite a lot of beer before it warms back up again. If it were more heat conductive too then it would also draw out heat more efficiently than air, so you could probably get away with a shorter coil and faster beer movement.
The easiest thing may be something like a big bucket of water in the fridge with the coil sitting in it. Though with this idea you may have to add something to the water to stop mould and stuff growing, and not sure about condensation either..
I did also wonder of you could make a spiral instead of a coil and stick it to the fridge's cooling area directly, so air isn't needed as a medium to transfer heat to it, but I've not got the experience of such things to know how well that would work.
Cheers
kev
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