I have decided that making beer from kits is fine, but it would be much better to make up my own recipes using malt extract, speciality grains and hops. To do this you need to boil the wort and the hops, and then cool it rapidly down to 20°C. To do this you can either place the pot in a sink with cold water which you replenish frequently, or you can use a wort chiller.
I decided that rather than purchase one, I would make my own as they are easy to make and an I am a cheapskate :-).
One trip to Wickes later and I had all I needed, 10 metres of 10mm copper piping, 2 jubilee clips and a coil of hosepipe.
The copper pipe was already in a coil so I just had to tighten the coils by hand so that they would fit into my stock-pot, and leave two tails pointing upwards where the hoses would attach.
To ensure that the coils stay tight together, I have looped some copper wire (the earth wire from some old twin+earth cable I had lying around) .
Two lengths of the hose were cut with enough length to reach the sink from the hob and these were fastened to the tails of the copper pipe using some insulating tape wrapped around the copper to build up the thickness and the jubilee clips.
To test it out and to also clean any nasty residues from the copper, I filled my stock-pot with 11.5 litres (approx 2.5 gallons) of water and added a good amount of citric acid and some vinegar and brought it to the boil.
When it was boiling I placed the chiller into the liquid for about 10 minutes. The hot acidic liquid cleaned up the copper a treat.
When I connected one of the hoses to the tap and turned it on, the liquid started cooling fairly quickly, within 10 minutes it was almost down to the magic 20 degrees.
It may not be the best looking bit of kit but it works well and was half the price of the commercially available chillers.
[...] for a minute and then cool the boiling wort using either a chiller like my D.I.Y. chiller or put the pot in a bath/sink of cold water and ice. If you don’t have ice, just make sure [...]