Friday was one of the most spontaneous days I have ever had, in terms of brewing anyway.  I have just returned from a long weekend and am too tired to write all about it.  The next post will give you all the details of the day's brewing.  That being said, through the course of the day I did decide to make a wort chiller, and I thought I'd share how to do it.

   I discovered via some web surfing during work that it is highly encouraged to use a wort chiller.  (Wort is essentially beer before the yeast are added.  A boiled concoction of water, grains, and hops.  Once you add the yeast the wort becomes alcoholic and is then, and only then, called beer).  Without a wort chiller you could literally watch a 5 gallon pot of wort cool for close to two hours!  So Thursday I went about searching for a chiller.  My local homebrew store was getting some in stock after the weeked, but they were $80.  I also checked on-line and the best price I found was $45 with shipping.  That seemed like a good deal except that I wanted to brew that day.  So after further web browsing I came to the conclusion that making a wort chiller seemed easy enough, it was cheap, and it was the only feasible way to have a full fermenter by night's end.

  I went to home depot and picked up the necessary supplies:

20' long 3/8'' diameter copper tubing
4 hose clamps
2 3' lengths of vinyl tubing
a tube bender

Total came to $42, and I had to buy a 4 pc tube bending set, because they didn't sell individual ones.

The assembly is pretty simple.  It took about 40 minutes.  I did it during the mashing process (not recommended, I got slightly distracted.  More on that tomorrow).

Step 1.  You can either free hand or use a cylindrical object like a pot to bend the tubing into a spiral.  Slowly work your way around with the tube bender.

Step 2. When you are finished coiling, bend a straight piece to extend from the bottom of the brew kettle up past the top of your kettle.  It should look like this.

Step 3.  Bend a 90 degree angle at the end of the straight pieces and extend another straight piece at the end of the coil.  Both ends should be relatively close together.

Step 4. Attach a length of tubing to each end using 2 hose clamps on each end.

Step 5.  Attach a faucet adapter to one end of the tubing.  (I could not find the right adapter so I omitted this step and just held the tube up to my bottle washer which shot the water through the tubes.  It got the job done, but holding it for 25 minutes is less than fun.  I will definitely purchase a faucet adapter before I brew again.)