Hi all,
I'm new to this so cut me some slack if it seems amateurish! When I brewed my first BIAB a couple months ago my brother loaned me a temp logger to throw in there. These are the results and just thought it might be interesting for some of those guys starting out;
I have a very basic setup with a plastic fermenter and heat belt plugged into a temp controller. I strap the belt about a third of the way up from the bottom and the probe is taped to the outside just below the top level of the wort.
This first chart shows the temps as I did the initial transfer from the no-chill cube to the fermenter (the temp logger went inside the fermenter, floating in the wort). You can see the first peak is when I bumped the temp from 18 degrees to 20 degrees before lowering again, and then toward the end of the ferment I bumped it up to 22 degrees (I don't know why I did that)! The fermenter was in a room that would swing from about 6 to 12 degrees, I also kept the fermenter covered in a blanket. Mostly it was set to 18 degrees and the controller would turn the heat belt on/off within a degree of that..
The second chart shows the ambient temp of the bottles after I bottled the beer. Bottles went into plastic tubs and then I put them in a spare room that typically isn't heated. There's a few temp swings as it was flipping freezing in Tassie this winter and only about a third way through I put a bar heater into the room. Even then the afternoon sun would significantly warm the room but it would drop suddenly into the evening and overnight. It was hard to control, although the beer still turned out great..
Anyway, I just thought this might be interesting to those guys who don't yet have all the gear and are curious about what could really be happening inside a fermenter/heatbelt combination. I'm picking up a fridge this weekend for better controlled fermentation (and bottle conditioning), so on another brew I'll log again and see what difference that makes.
Cheers!
I'm new to this so cut me some slack if it seems amateurish! When I brewed my first BIAB a couple months ago my brother loaned me a temp logger to throw in there. These are the results and just thought it might be interesting for some of those guys starting out;
I have a very basic setup with a plastic fermenter and heat belt plugged into a temp controller. I strap the belt about a third of the way up from the bottom and the probe is taped to the outside just below the top level of the wort.
This first chart shows the temps as I did the initial transfer from the no-chill cube to the fermenter (the temp logger went inside the fermenter, floating in the wort). You can see the first peak is when I bumped the temp from 18 degrees to 20 degrees before lowering again, and then toward the end of the ferment I bumped it up to 22 degrees (I don't know why I did that)! The fermenter was in a room that would swing from about 6 to 12 degrees, I also kept the fermenter covered in a blanket. Mostly it was set to 18 degrees and the controller would turn the heat belt on/off within a degree of that..
The second chart shows the ambient temp of the bottles after I bottled the beer. Bottles went into plastic tubs and then I put them in a spare room that typically isn't heated. There's a few temp swings as it was flipping freezing in Tassie this winter and only about a third way through I put a bar heater into the room. Even then the afternoon sun would significantly warm the room but it would drop suddenly into the evening and overnight. It was hard to control, although the beer still turned out great..
Anyway, I just thought this might be interesting to those guys who don't yet have all the gear and are curious about what could really be happening inside a fermenter/heatbelt combination. I'm picking up a fridge this weekend for better controlled fermentation (and bottle conditioning), so on another brew I'll log again and see what difference that makes.
Cheers!
