Review: Silver Serpent Wort Chiller

This past Christmas I received the Silver Serpent stainless steel immersion wort chiller. I've had the opportunity to use it a few times now, so it seemed appropriate to share a review with readers of Begin Brewing.

The chiller arrives in a cardboard box, ready to use. Hoses and fittings are already attached. A quick pressure check on brew day showed no leakage. (The photo at left is from their Midwest Supplies web site, where mine was purchased.)

There are twist ties on the coils that I removed, not certain if they were food safe or temperature safe. There are no instructions in the box with the chiller to tell you whether to remove them or not.

I'm currently doing all my brewing in our home kitchen. Our stove is fortunately powerful enough to bring a 5-gallon batch of beer to a rolling boil, so it's worked well. The unfortunate problem is that the faucet on our kitchen sink is designed without an aerator, so there's no way to attach a garden hose fitting adapter to it.

My solution to the problem was to visit a local aquarium store and purchase a submersible aquarium pump for about $30. Then, I tangle the "hose fitting end" into the drain, attach the other end of the tube to the outlet on the aquarium pump, fill the sink with cold water, and start the pump. The pump pushes cold water from my sink into the chiller and out the other side. This is the opposite direction from the design, but shouldn't have a negative effect on heat transfer as far as I know.

When I used the Silver Serpent in the winter on a 4 gallon boil I made in January, when our tap water was about 53 degrees Fahrenheit coming out of the tap, the wort chilled to yeast pitching temperature in around 25-30 minutes.

A few weeks ago, I brewed a batch of Belgian Tripel using the Brewer's Best extract based kit (which I'll talk about in a future post). This 5-gallon high-gravity beer took almost 75 minutes to chill to yeast pitching temperature using the tap water (measured at 59.3 degrees Fahrenheit) and aquarium pump. That was longer than I expected, but still much faster than I was ever able to chill my wort before.

As you can see above, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees every 5 or 6 minutes. With colder water on the incoming side, you'd probably see a faster decline in temperature.

Cleanup of the Silver Serpent is easy. You remove it from the brew kettle, rinse it thoroughly, and brush off any residue from the brew kettle. Once dried, it's ready to use again.

Being made of stainless steel, the Silver Serpent is a little more expensive than some of its copper competitors. I've heard that you may see corrosion and other issues with the copper chillers, so I thought the stainless made a nice alternative. It looks as good now as when I got it six months ago.

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it. If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone. It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package. This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it). As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step. This can radically shorten your brewing time. For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,...

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube. About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice. He shows three batches in the video. One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water. The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water. All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment. I'm changin...

What I Learned About Brewing in 2021

Last year, I brewed 20 batches of adult beverages (primarily beer and test mashes). In no particular order, here are things I learned during the year: The COVID-19 pandemic left me with more time at home to brew, but at the same time made doing so a bit less enjoyable. Why? Because I could not share my homebrew with family and friends as easily as I could pre-pandemic. Without feedback from my friends about what they did (and didn't) like in my beer, I was less motivated to brew and less able to improve my beer than in prior years. The pump on The Grainfather has a life span (in my experience) of around 200 brews before it dies, and the "official" replacement is way too expensive to suit me (like $190). I was able to replace it with a pump from Amazon for about $70 that seems to flow much better and stronger than the official pump. It took some redneck-looking jerry-rigging to fix it, but the system flows better now and I can continue brewing. On a personal...

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