Boll Weevil Brewery

After an hour or two of soldering, it's complete. I formed it around a corney keg to get the coils even...well, even enough anyway. I didn't really know whether to bring in the cooling water into the immersion chiller through the top of the coils, or the bottom, but after testing (and after getting feedback from rec.crafts.brewing) have decided to bring the cold water into the top of the coils. "Make the cold water meet the hottest part of the wort" as Mike Dixon said.

Another view. The little copper "rods" supporting the coils are a bare copper ground which I picked up at Lowe's in the electrical section. It's also "soft drawn" or flexible copper, but with a length this short and soldered to each wrap of the coil, it lends a lot of support. After unrolling the bare ground wire, it wasn't quite straight, but a little bit of persuasive pounding on the floor of the garage with a rubber mallet made it submit. When soldering to the coils, I found that they weren't all "even", so I soldered it to all of the coils that were touching the wire, then after the solder joints had hardened, I used the rubber mallet again to pound the wire closer to the rest of them. It worked out pretty good and after using it I'll say it chills the wort very good as well.

Close up of the copper ground wire soldered to the copper tubing. It really stiffens up the thing, which was almost like a giant slinky before I put this brace on it! Some people just leave the coil loose, but I figured I'd do it "whole assed" instead of just "half assed." Giving the immersion chiller coils lends support and protection to the chiller itself, but also doing it this way I'm insuring that all of the coils remain seperate to allow the wort to flow through them adding more surface area contact between the copper and the hot wort.

Soldering is by no means difficult. Just be sure to clean the copper at the point of contact with the piece to be soldered (hint: fine sandpaper or steel wool) and be sure to use flux. Also, make sure your solder is NOT lead based, ask the salesperson for solder and flux that you can use on drinking or potable water pipes. Double check this; you don't want to get lead poisoning from your wort or beer, especially after going to all of this trouble, lol.

The Immersion Wort chiller fits nicely in the 7.5 gallon turkey cooker pot (turkey cooker, yeah, that's what it's for), also from Lowes. After I decide how I want to route the tubes out of the lid, I'll cut the long section of tubing to even things up. The coils could have been a bit larger, but maybe one day I'll add another coil on the outside of the loop for extra cooling. At 15 bucks, 50 more feet won't break the bank. Also, the brass water hose connectors were pretty expensive, so ask the sales clerk for a cheaper alternative. I grabbed them because the sales person helping me was a dumbass and I was tired of looking. They were the first things I saw that let me go from the copper line to the water hose.