Brew your beer at home - cooling the wort

Cooling the wort is a very important phase in the beer making process. Once you finished boiling the wort, it need to be cooled  to reach about 24℃ as fast as possible. The faster you cool the wort, so less it will became contaminated with unwanted bacterias. 

I tried all kind of approaches to cool the wort.  I initially bought a cooling spiral. While on the paper this was a perfect approach, in reality it was a waste of money for me. The main problem was, how to flow the cold water throw the cooling spiral. Connecting spiral to water tap is not good  enough as the water from the tap is not so cold.  I then tried to put a water tank filled with ice above the beer vessel, connect one pipe to the water tank and siphon water from the second pipe.  This allowed to water flow from the tank throw cooling spiral, while i collect water on the other side. This was still complicated and from time to time pipes were disconnecting causing flooding. Investing in buying pumps to circulate the water was not really a solution for me either.

I then decided to make as much ice as possible and put entire kettle with the wort into tank filled with water and ice. Although it's a bit dangerous to transfer my 30 Litter hot kettle into this tank,  the approach is simple enough as long as you have a large tank to contain the kettle with the wort. The downside was that ice melted too fast and it is not enough to cool the wort to desired temperature. 

I finally realised how to make it right. You still need a large tank to contain the kettle with the wort. But this time, I didn't used ice. Take empty 1.5 Litter bottles. I use about 10 of them. Fill them with water and put into freezer overnight. On the next day you will have iced bottles, hard as rocks. Cooling the boiled wort now going to be easy and very fast. Fill water tank  and put iced bottles inside. Then transfer the kettle with the wort into the tank. The iced bottles will cool the water very fast and the ice inside bottles is melted very slowly, much slower then just throw ice directly into the water. 

This did the trick for me.