Chilling at the Weekend

Finally have our chilling systems up and running - not that we will need them in this weather! Our conditioning room is cooled by a pretty basic pub chiller run off a roof mounted condensing unit which will keep the temperature around 10ºC. The unit is only around 3Kw so will need to be upgraded once the warmer weather starts, but for now it will do the job.

We also need a cooling system in the fermenting room to keep our fermenting wort around 20ºC and then ultimately down to around 10ºC when fermentation is complete. For this task we are using a machine called an icebuilder which is more commonly found in a dairy to cool milk. The icebuilder creates ice which cools down the water in the tank before it gets pumped through our chilling pipes to circulate in and out of each fermenter jacket. Thanks to Marc my friendly refrigeration engineer we managed to get it all up and running over the weekend. Slight problem in that we have a small leak in the icebuilder tank, but hopefully plenty of silicone sealant will sort it out.