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Cooling Mash Using Non-jacketed Tanks
Looking for input on mash cooling. What recommended process would work to cool to pitch temp without the use of a jacketed chilled tank? Don’t need to crash cool but looking to speed up the process. I assume a counter flow heat exchanger of sorts would suffice? I’m talking small volumes around 100 gallon. I do have ice cold 49° spring water and would like to ferment on grain.
What methods have been working?
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24 Replies
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do a double thick mash and add the rest of the water ,cold, at the end. if you are using enzymes this shouldnt be an issue, just pitch a little alpha as you are heating up, to keep things from getting too thick.
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I actually like immersion coils better than tube in tube, so our mash tuns come with internal cooling coils also our pro series mash tuns have really strong agitators so you can leave some of the water out of the recipe and then add it to the mash as cold water so that the crash cool is done in 2 or 3 minutes. We do have tube in tube heat exchangers at a great price that will crash cool your mash in 10 to 15 minutes. Of you would like a qoute email paul@distillery-equipment.com or if you would like to discuss call 417-778-6908 and ask for Paul.
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Yep you’re on the right track with a counter flow heat exchanger. That’s a small volume and if you can count on 49 degree spring water year round that’s a great cooling temp. Hit up Jesse at Trident Stills in Maine, he can fab you something that’s sized appropriately (I think you’ll find other suppliers will only have units that are wayyy oversized for your operation) and you can’t beat his prices. He made us a couple that were priced much better than other quotes we got, not to mention he is full of great mashing/distilling advice if you ever need any. Also what @ViolentBlue suggested about keeping the volume low and topping off with cold water is great advice. After doing that, an immersion cooler like @Southernhighlander suggested will probably cut it too, though I have never used one personally.
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I was also researching immersion coils but was thinking more on the lines of using one in the ferment tank. What’s your thoughts on using one in the mash kettle vs in the ferment tank? I have three 110 gallon conical poly tanks that I could potentially pump one batch into and let an immersion cooler go to work while I’m mashing in a new batch. Opening on the ferment tanks is only around 12″ diameter so somewhat limited as to what I could fit in there.
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Check out: http://www.bubbasbarrels.com/cooling-coil
These are made for ~100 gallon fermenters. If you don’t have the right tri-clamp fitting for your fermenter, you can buy the coils alone and make adapt them to fit your tank lid/manway. That’s what I did with our 275 gallon IBC totes that we use as fermenters.
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Nice idea, I’m surprised I missed them. Do you agitate by some means to increase the contact with the coil?
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These coils are undersized for our fermenters but we don’t need tight temperature control. We don’t agitate, the fermentation is doing that for us in a way. I’ve also built some coils for cooling mash from coiled copper pipe you can buy at Lowe’s. They sell it in a flat coil and you can just slowly unwind it and coil it yourself but the diameter of the coil would be better for a 55 gallon drum. We used something like this: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Mueller-Streamline-3-4-in-x-60-ft-Copper-K-Coil/4742152 made a cooling coil with it and put it in a drum filled with cold water and pumped the mash through the coil into the fermenter.
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Pour Decisions .
A coil will cool either way but it will cool a little faster if you move the mash around. A pump to circulate the mash in your fermenter would give you the circulation that you need. If your mash is grain out, you can use a centrifugal pump to circulate with. If it’s grain in just let me know and I will give you some recommendations.
We have coils for 100 gallon fermenters as well. Ours are larger, have more surface area and cost less that Carl’s (Bubba’s). Carl is a great guy and a friend of mine. His products are good quality and well priced, but I have him beat on this one.
Just email Susan@distillery-equipment.com and let her know that you would like pricing and pics of our cooling coil for 100 gallon barrel fermenters.
We do not have these on any of our web sites.
Thanks
Paul Hall
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Thanks Paul. I sent Susan an email for info, I’m Interested in those. I will be fermenting on grain so would like to also have some method of movement.
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I built a 105′ tube in tube heat exchanger. I pump my mash through this with a March nano brewery pump but I do mill all my grain to flour. It works great and washes out easy.
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Nice cooling rig, well done.
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Beautiful rig, I recall seeing pics of your masterpiece of a setup!
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Some of our mashes are about 125 gallons, we do the whole thing with cold water / backset additions without additional cooling. In the summer we have to pre-chill the water as our municipal water rises to about 70F but its a small enough volume that 3 or 4 – 5 gallon buckets in a chest freezer is sufficient. We have a chilling coil but have only used it a few times in the last several years during extreme hot weather events.
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The coil inside the tank with a “dirty” mixture (containing harder particles) will clog where the tubes fit against the tank walls. There will be dead zones. You will have to disassemble the unit to wash these hard-to-reach places from the remnants of the grains. (it’s my opinion).
The “pipe in pipe” heat exchanger option costs money, this is a separate additional device, I agree. But just such a solution (pipe in pipe) is used by engineers for “dirty” mixtures (with solid particles of grains). It’s easy to clean and doesn’t have to be taken apart to clean. Strong water pressure + detergents flush the pipes perfectly. For large tanks, I would recommend making a “cooling jacket” (double tank walls). This will allow you not to have problems with cleaning the tank.
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That’s nice! What size are the tubes?
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We have found that cooling inside the mash tun takes a lot more time and water vs transferring it to a fermenter and cooling there. The mash tun just has so much residual heat that it takes more to cool it down.
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Thank confirms my suspicions, thanks for the input
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does that mean you don’t currently have cooling capacity for your fermenters?
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It’s 3/4” inner with a 1 1/4” jacket
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I do not currently. been at the hobby level for and moving towards getting my DSP so need to make some process improvements!
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At scale you will likely need to unless you’re running single walled farms in a verrrrrrrry mild climate. In scaling up what we found is that in cooker cooling is exponentially faster than cooling via Hx in terms of total cook time efficiency. Part of it is also the direct spare on our new cooker, but my single new 3k gallon cooker can fill one of my 6k ferms in about 4.5 hours ready to pitch, cooking in my two 1.75k gallon steam jacketed no cooling cookers to fill may 3800 gallon ferm is about 6/7 hours (45 minute transfer/cooling time). in cooker cooling allows you to adjust to your breaks more quickly without playing games on grist ratios. Need a fuck of an agitator on it though, highly recommend Brawn. Ours is a vendome, Paul is making similar ones that are just as good from what I have seen for much cheaper.
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Alex,
We did a lot of testing with different positions for our immersion coils and we found a sweet spot where little to no build up occurs between the coil and tank walls in our corn cooker mash tuns. What build up does occur is knocked down by our high pressure clean in place system which uses spinning, high volume, high pressure spray balls to do a complete cleaning in a matter of seconds.
Of course grain in corn mashes must have liquification enzymes added at the beginning of the cook. These enzymes allow the finely ground corn flour to be suspended in the liquid. This enzyme is added for liquification, not starch to sugar conversion.
The starch to sugar conversion enzymes are added after the first phase of the crash cool, in the form of malted barley and or other malted grains and sometimes as simple enzymes.
If the corn mash is not properly liquefied, the corn flour will fall out of suspension and a lot of build up will occur between the coil and sidewall just as you said and sticking will also occur in certain areas of the pot. Grain in corn mashes are almost always liquefied by American distillers.
Also the mash tuns I am referencing are corn cooking mash tuns. I would never put a crash cooling coil in a mash tun used for malted Barley and other malted grains as those grains will certainly build up between the cooling coil and side wall becouse those grains are not finally ground and not in suspension.
We found that our coils, cool faster and use less energy to cool, than our cooling jackets or tube in tube heat exchangers of the same price. We have over 90 of our corn mash tuns in distilleries with our internal cooling coils and they work pretty good. Of course they are for liquefied corn mashes that are being cooked then crash cooled for starch to sugar conversion, which is something that you probably have less experience with since Bourbon and Tennessee whiskeys are not traditional spirits in Eastern Europe where vodka and brandies are the tradition.
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The reason I asked is that I have a roughly similar 60′ setup with 2″ copper inside 3″ PVC. Looks like hell compared to yours, but it’s out of sight out of mind.
I would have been nervous about the 3/4″ inner, but it seems to work. Good job.
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For the internal coil application- I am really careful about the residual heat from the mash tun itself.
Also, i like to use a 2 stage cooling- first stage cools mash to 150F, then use a chiller and reservoir for second stage.
Pictured is evaporative glycol cooler that I have used on large apps for first stage- expensive now, but for multiple mash runs per week, helps on power usage using a fan to do the work rather than a refrigeration system, but the first cost is a doozey for a 3-5 year payback.
Typical for a Northern climate, a chiller and drycooler each with its own circulator attached to an internal plate exchanger to make cold water for the cold water reservoir. Customer uses the drycooler alone from September to March up in the Western CT mountains. Chiller is 10 Ton, Drycooler is 6 Ton nominal (12 ton, at least, in winter).
Who knows what KW cost will be in the next year.
Mike
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