Fermenting Options

[MarkBastard]

A lot of attention is given to the various ways you can actually brew, from BIAB, to HERMS / RIMS etc. The sky is the limit and I've seen some pretty hardcore setups on here.

But I haven't seen that much information on fermenting techniques and gear. Seems to be plastic fermenters, glass carboys, and stainless steel conical. Sometimes no temp control, sometimes rudimentary temp control using ice, fridgemates on fridges / freezers etc. But nothing really high tech I've found (unless I'm not looking hard enough).

The reason I ask is I do 20L batches as I only want to just fill up a corny. That said I'm finding it hard to be able to do more than a couple of batches at a time with the space I've got. Fridges end up being massive in proportion to the litres of wort you are controlling. For example my old fridge was about 300L and only fit one 'bunnings' fermenter, I recently picked up a bar fridge that's about 120L and it still just fits the 25L bunnings fermenter I put 20L of wort into. That's about the best cooling vessel to wort size ratio I can achieve.

So my plan is to get three bar fridges in an array in my garage, all with their own temp control. This is the most compact I can make it as far as I can tell.

I'm finding my ales are taking about 10 days to ferment with US05 at 18 degrees. I then usually crash chill for a few days and my total turnaround from wort in fermenter to beer in keg is at best 2 weeks. Then it takes another week or two for the beer to get really good. If I get through a keg a week drinking wise, I need to have at least three batches going at any one time, so I think of this as a minimum. If I want to do lagers I'm shit out of luck!

So it got me thinking, how good it'd be to somehow get this 'ratio' down, so that the equipment size used to temperate control the fermenters was smaller in proportion to the amount of wort I put in the fermenters.

The way I see it the only real option is to have one single cooling device or compressor, and have a way of distributing this cooling device to each fermenter based on the desired temp. So glycol or water in rotation, coming from a resouvior. As I would like to individually set the temperator for each fermenter and be able to crash chill each fermenter without having to rack etc.

I guess perhaps the way to go about this would be to use those gatorade style round eskis with a fermenter / carboy sitting inside it. Water or glycol would sit in between the eski and the fermenter / carboy and the temperature would be regulated by pumping cold water / glycol in and allowing the hotter water / glycol to spill out at the top and back to the resivour.

The water/glycol would have to be 1 degrees or something like that I guess. And the eski would have to be air tight to insulate the cold.

Or do the smaller conical fermenters have jackets in them you can pump glycol through and I just wasted 10 minutes typing this crap out? Haha.

I'd love to be able to just set up devices on a bench that were self contained in this regard. Fridges are cheap and plentiful but space (in my case) unfortunately isn't.

 

[katzke]

A lot of attention is given to the various ways you can actually brew, from BIAB, to HERMS / RIMS etc. The sky is the limit and I've seen some pretty hardcore setups on here.

But I haven't seen that much information on fermenting techniques and gear. Seems to be plastic fermenters, glass carboys, and stainless steel conical. Sometimes no temp control, sometimes rudimentary temp control using ice, fridgemates on fridges / freezers etc. But nothing really high tech I've found (unless I'm not looking hard enough).

The reason I ask is I do 20L batches as I only want to just fill up a corny. That said I'm finding it hard to be able to do more than a couple of batches at a time with the space I've got. Fridges end up being massive in proportion to the litres of wort you are controlling. For example my old fridge was about 300L and only fit one 'bunnings' fermenter, I recently picked up a bar fridge that's about 120L and it still just fits the 25L bunnings fermenter I put 20L of wort into. That's about the best cooling vessel to wort size ratio I can achieve.

So my plan is to get three bar fridges in an array in my garage, all with their own temp control. This is the most compact I can make it as far as I can tell.

I'm finding my ales are taking about 10 days to ferment with US05 at 18 degrees. I then usually crash chill for a few days and my total turnaround from wort in fermenter to beer in keg is at best 2 weeks. Then it takes another week or two for the beer to get really good. If I get through a keg a week drinking wise, I need to have at least three batches going at any one time, so I think of this as a minimum. If I want to do lagers I'm shit out of luck!

So it got me thinking, how good it'd be to somehow get this 'ratio' down, so that the equipment size used to temperate control the fermenters was smaller in proportion to the amount of wort I put in the fermenters.

The way I see it the only real option is to have one single cooling device or compressor, and have a way of distributing this cooling device to each fermenter based on the desired temp. So glycol or water in rotation, coming from a resouvior. As I would like to individually set the temperator for each fermenter and be able to crash chill each fermenter without having to rack etc.

I guess perhaps the way to go about this would be to use those gatorade style round eskis with a fermenter / carboy sitting inside it. Water or glycol would sit in between the eski and the fermenter / carboy and the temperature would be regulated by pumping cold water / glycol in and allowing the hotter water / glycol to spill out at the top and back to the resivour.

The water/glycol would have to be 1 degrees or something like that I guess. And the eski would have to be air tight to insulate the cold.

Or do the smaller conical fermenters have jackets in them you can pump glycol through and I just wasted 10 minutes typing this crap out? Haha.

I'd love to be able to just set up devices on a bench that were self contained in this regard. Fridges are cheap and plentiful but space (in my case) unfortunately isn't.

Well if money is no object you can get cooled conicals.

The best way to do it is use a chest freezer with a temp control. Leaves you out for lagering unless you lager all of your brews. But you said you have a fridge so that would solve that problem. Only problem with a chest freezer is you need to lift the fermentor up and out. Not much of a problem for a healthy person.

 

[MarkBastard]

I'm currently using a chest freezer for two fermenters and a bar fridge for one. The Chest freezer is 220L and holds two fermenters. Not ideal using 220L to hold 40L of wort.

 

[Bribie G]

The original 19L corny kegs were used for postmix syrup and the home brew world has always been welded firmly to five imperial gallons or 23 litres, so never the twain will meet.

If I were kegging I would either do triple batches in a 60 litre fermenter which will still fit into a normal family size fridge or:

The Willow 20 L skinny jerries are actually 23 L . I would ferment to about 18 L with enough headspace, then by the time I had added my polyclar water, hop tea or even just a litre or so of sterile de oxygenated water (assuming that the primary is done a tad over gravity) I should have enough to fill a corny nicely.

Two Willows should sit nicely in most fridges with three possible in a biggie (have heard some guys here doing three). Edit: If using a chest freezer you could probably get a shitload in. If you like I'll bring one along to BABBs Thursday and you can do a measure up.

For cleaning, do as the glass carboy guys with brushes etc. I use a willow for some of my secondaries and napisan digests trub rings etc nicely.
Being a more volumetric drinker :icon_drunk: cornie kegs are a totally pissy little size IMHO and I wouldn't even look at doing anything less than a 60. There's a couple at the LHBS and you know they aren't as big as you would imagine (height or width only squares as the volume cubes). However if I ever went into bulk draught beer I'd get a couple of purpose made 200 litre SS bright beer tanks to put in my cold room with the glass window looking out onto my bar area / patio but that's Lotto Dreaming territory :icon_cheers:

 

[MarkBastard]

Yeah I've got one of those blue 20L jerrys. Not a bad idea.

The other option I have is not crash chilling in primary but instead transferring to one of those cubes and then chucking it in the serving fridge which is at 4 degrees, but to be honest I can't think of anything more annoying than racking. Probably a lazy viewpoint but I hate any additional work after pitching, due to everything needing to be sterile and getting messy after being used. Another space problem kind of as I don't have a big laundry sink etc. Cleaning a corny and a fermenter per batch is sort of enough for me.

My biggest 'wish list' is to have the following features

1 - Lots of 20L batches fitting into a small area.
2 - Each one being individually temperature controlled.

At the moment for example I have two fermenters in a chest freezer. I had another batch in the bar fridge but it finished on the weekend so I've kegged it. One of the batches in the chest freezers is clearly finished but I haven't taken a gravity reading since pitching because it's right down the bottom of the freezer. The second one is sitting on the compressor hump and a brick and it still have krausen on the top. I'm gunna have to transfer that one back to the bar fridge, take a gravity reading of the lower one, then crash chill in the freezer. A lot of dicking around which I'm more than happy to do for now because I'm only starting in brewing, but I wonder what the people with all the brewing bling think about doing stuff like that. I can't imagine the guys that have spent thousands on their HERMS system or whatever so they can press one button and walk away are too happy about the fermenting side of it. What do they do? What ways do they think about improving what they do?

 

[Screwtop]

My personal preference for fermenting is a freezer, have both a fridge and chest freezer, each will hold 2 plastic fermenters. The freezer holds temp better and no need to use a cover and airlock as it fills with Co2 quickly protecting the brew, have had no infections using the freezer. A bit inconvenient to use, to take a sample from the tap I use a plastic juice bottle cap under the spout and reach down to turn the tap, lifting in and out can be a bit of a PITA too, but I still preference the freezer.

Screwy

 

[justsomeguy]

I can currently ferment 40 litres in a 120 litre bar fridge. I can fit 2 23 litre jerrycans side by side in the fridge. Much better than a single Coopers fermenter .

The fridge I got recently should hold three jerrycans side by side with the bottom shelf replaced with something stronger.

gary