Cooling Fermenter

[aaronh]

Get a dead fridge and rotate frozen water filled soft drink bottles.

Been doing this for a couple of years now and it works fine, currently got 2 lagers in there at 10C
and its 38C outside you can brew without worry all year round and no extra power bills

Cheers
BB

I'm in the same situation with my shed the only suitable place to brew in and it reaches 40C on a standard summer day. If I place the fermenter in a dead deep freezer, how many frozen bottles a day will it take to keep at an optimal brewing temp? :beer:

Cheers
Aaron H

 

[simpletotoro]

I'm in the same situation with my shed the only suitable place to brew in and it reaches 40C on a standard summer day. If I place the fermenter in a dead deep freezer, how many frozen bottles a day will it take to keep at an optimal brewing temp? :beer:

Cheers
Aaron H

hi... i used to use an old fridge to do this...i needed 3 X 2 litre bottles frozen per day to get it down to temp.... then just one either side of the fermenter once i reached my target temp....best way to judge probably would be to do a trial run with water in a fermenter ....that way at least when you have chilled fridge to desired temp it'll be easier to maintain...oh and by the way go and buy a decent glass thermetre (costs about $12) from LHBS and test the temp of fluid inside the fermenter ...

but the best advice i can give you is save your pennies and buy one of the various plug in temp controllers....saves a lot of hassle and effort... but by all means go the frozen bottle method till then

cheers simpletotoro

 

[BoilerBoy]

How many bottles?

Depends on Fridge size bottle size and whether your brewing an ale or a lager.

As simpletotoro suggested a test with water would be a good start,

With 2 lagers in there now at 40C plus heat for the last 3 days I have 12 bottles some 2L others 1L holding
9-10C and thats the most I have ever had to use, but its normally much less than that. With this current heat wave its about as extreme as it can get and obviously for an ale you would need less bottles for 18C.

Yes, a brew fridge would be great, but like many people there are too many other things that are demanding my money at the moment, but mean time it works and the end result is beer. :beer:

An observation about brewers is that the passion for there craft seems to provide the necessary means to overcome any hurdle big, small, temporary or no matter how extreme to achieve the beer they want to make.
A resourceful bunch indeed!

Cheers :chug:
BB