How quickly can you pull beer through a jockey box with a 70' coil?

I'm looking at building a jockey box with a 70', 5/16" (21.3m, 8mm) stainless steel coil (installed in a drum-style cooler.) Seems to be a good compromise between size, weight and cost.

How quickly can I pull cold beer out of it without it foaming?

My back-of-envelope calculation says a 2133.6cm by 0.8cm coil holds 0.42 2133.6 = 10723 or just over a litre of beer. The Mythbusters say you can cool a six pack of beer in five minutes with salted ice water, so I'd interpolate that one beer per minute would be achievable.

Can anyone confirm my theory with experimental evidence?

Topic serving cooling homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

The cooling effectiveness of the coil is a function of several things:

  • Contact surface area
  • Contact time
  • The difference in temperature between the warm beer and cool water.

The MoreBeer Draft Box has 50 feet of 3/8" tubing, providing about 700 square inches of contact surface versus your proposed 69 square inches. So I would say you need to run the beer approximately 10x slower than the MoreBeer model to get similar cooling, which may be prohibitively slow.

Also, Mythbusters is a fun show but I wouldn't trust it for any real measurements or proof of anything. They say that a 6-pack of beer cooled in 5 minutes, but how warm was the beer to start? How much cold water did they use? Was there any circulation? Assuming they had enough water, it probably doesn't matter if you're cooling 1 beer or 6, since all the cans have the same volume and surface area, so I don't think you could cool a single can in only 1 minute.

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