The Shirron Wort Chiller
The first day we used the Shirron Wort Chiller was the first brew day of the season. It was one of a number of upgrades we had applied to a pretty old, all-gravity system. By the time we got to the wort chiller, we were pretty hesitant, since equipment failures had forced our hand a couple of times already during the day. However, the Shirron did not let us down.
The hardest part of using the Shirron was the setup. We had to find some 1/2″ NPT female connectors with the PEX endings so we could connect the hose easily, and we got quick disconnects for the garden hose. If this sounds easy to you, you’re right…. and that’s the *hardest* part of using the thing!
We ran the wort straight out of the boil kettle at 212F, into the wort chiller, and it came out VERY cold. It was really kind of surreal. Here’s a unit that’s about 10″ x 3″ x 1″, it looks like nothing - and you can barely hold the hose bringing the wort from the boiler, and the hose coming out of the chiller is actually *cold*. We’ve determined that next time we probably should not run the garden hose at full steam, which means we can easily do the job without wasting near as much water.
Another worry I had was what the flow rate was going to be like, being that we were doing this purely with gravity - no pumps. We ran an entire 5-gallon batch right into the fermentor in under 10 minutes. Perfection has been achieved!
We bought the Shirron figuring that if it seemed like a workable solution, maybe we’d upgrade to the Therminator at some point. However, this worked so exceedingly well that we cannot imagine what the Therminator could possibly do to make it sell for over $100 more than the Shirron. At $85US, the Shirron seems like a no-brainer to me.