I was in a bit of a rush on my last brew day and had to settle for not quite optimal pitching temps. That was the final kick in the pants that I needed to finally start thinking about a good design for a pre-chiller. I've never really liked the ideas that i've seen build alreay. The chamber type builds that hold ice and let water flow over it work fine, until all the ice melts, so I wasn't really into that idea. You usually need to disassemble them to refill it, so you also halt the chilling process while doing so.

The other ones i've seen involve a length of hose or copper tube immersed in an ice bath before it goes to the wort. I don't like that idea. It seems like you wouldn't get a good transfer of heat unless you had a really big cooler and a looong line to run through it. It just seems like a bulky mess and a good deal of $ for something that awkward.

I started to rethink the chamber idea, but it would need to be much larger than your standard pvc tube filled with ice. That's when the duh moment happened. I already have a bunch of large, water-tight containers that are meant for liquid transfer. Kegs!

You can fill it with ice, run water through it and swap them out in no time at all with the quick disconnects.

Here's what I've come up with so far. The cost was about $5 in fittings (I already had the kegs and qd's). It only took about 1 minute to shove it all together. The test run should happen next week sometime, as I'll need to stop and grab a bag of ice to use.