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Ground Water Issues

Ground Water Not Getting it Done?

When temperatures soar, it is difficult to cool your wort to pitching temperatures using just ground water and an immersion or counterflow chiller.  

Problems with slow cooling:

Slow cooling creates problems since temperatures between 80F and 140F can allow bacteria and wild yeast to contaminate your wort.  Also, slowly cooling can create off flavors from sulfur componds (for example dimethyl sulfide) that are usually eliminated at higher temperatures.  

Quickly get to pitching temperatures:

You can quickly finish cooling your wort to pitching temperatures with a Cooling Jacket.  Just use your immersion or counter flow chillers as normal (cooling your wort to the mid to high 80's, or so), then run cold water through the cooling jacket and let its 320 square inches of cooling surface do the rest.  In a matter of minutes, your wort is cooled down to pitching temperatures!  This greatly reduces the chance of contamination and off flavors from slow cooling!

The chart below shows how quickly 6-gallons of 90 degree F water was cooled using a Cool Zone system (with ice water as the coolant).  Dropping the temperature 20 degrees F (from 90 degrees to 70 degrees) took only 50 minutes.  If you need to cool your wort even more before pitching your yeast, Cool Zone can cool the 6-gallons from 90 degrees to 54 degrees F in just over two hours.

cool-zone-cooling-trend.jpg

 A Real World Example:

During our brewing session over Labor Day (temperatures were over 100 degrees), ground water was able to cool 15 gallons of wort to only 93.5 degrees F.  This is considered the danger zone for bacteria and other unwanted "critters" to contaminate a batch.  We used Cool Zone to bring the temperature down from 93.5 degrees to 69.9 degrees in 1 hour and 42 minutes using just ice water as the coolant.  This minimized the chance of contamination and off flavors from "slow cooling".  

   ground-water-cooled-to-93.jpg   cooled-to-pitching-temps.jpg

 

The Cooling Jacket fits most of the common glass and plastic fermenters (even those with spigots), as well as conicals, Sanke kegs, larger kegs and other types of fermenters.  If you have questions about whether our Cooling Jacket will fit your fermenter, please contact us.

The Cooling Jacket fits glass and plastic carboys and buckets:

fermenters-glass-plastic-bucket.jpg

 

It also fits some conicals and 1/6th barrell Sanke Kegs and many other fermenters 

conical-with-cool-jacket3.jpg          sanke-keg-with-cooling-jacket.jpg     plastic-fermenter-with-cooling-jacket.jpg

 

And it fits larger fermenters and kegs with the optional Expansion Link.

 expansion-link-w-fermenter-02736.jpgwine-tanks-2.jpg



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