FTS's for the 17 gallon Chronicle.

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Thefatdoghead

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Thought I would start a new thread on this system.

What the system is for people who dont already know, is a fermentation control without using a fridge.

Basically you have 2 stainless coils, a submersible pump, a jacket for the fermentor and a control unit for twmp control.

The system works perfect for fermentation although when it comes to pulling the temp down for crash chilling the problems start.

I tried 60L of watet at 2 deg C with an ambient of 30 degrees. The wort was at 22 deg to start. The wort stopped at 12 degrees and stayed there. The freezer could not keep up with the heat loss.

I then bought 20 litres of glycol and added 20L of distilled water to the glycol as per the chart i found online. Gravity is supposed to be 1.120 and im pretty close to that.

Chilled the glycol to -4 deg C and tried to chill the beer down again with no luck.

Im now going to try chill down to -27 just to crash the beer so i can transfer it to the keg.

Im thinking im going to need a glycol chiller but when i bought this system they do say you can crash chill to 1 or 2 degrees with a freezer system. Although reading it for the second time, all I see are numbers and words like 'should' and 'may'.

The second problem is that ive dumpped the trub off and now the beer is only just touching the coils inside the fementor. So it will never get down in temp anyway. Ill just give it a try and see what happens.

Ive sent an email to SS so lets see what they come back with.
 
Yeah that coil needs to be centre of your wort to be able to cool to crash temps. On the phone so can't link, I've been following an HBT thread on exactly thing. For the 1/2 BBL (17 gal) I don't think there is an alternative to a glycol chiller that will get the job done. However there is good news if you do head down that path and that would be adding further fermenters down the track os easy and a unit able to cope with say 2 1/2 BBL units and 2 7gals is only slightly more than a glycol chiller able to only do the 1 1/2 bbl.

When crashing try to crash in 24 hrs or more or you'll freeze some beer around the coils. Will post a link for you when I have a chance.
 
Answer back from SS was the 17gal system would never pull 60L of wort to crash temps and hold it. They are bringing out an affordable glycol chiller.
 
Im going to try a heap of chinese container sized ice cubes in a 60 L fermentor. Will it work? Ill need to get to at least 5 deg and hold it there for a couple of days.
See how I go. Ill post back results.
 
Just uploading the second vid but looks like this method will get me out of trouble for a while. Fermentor is sitting on 4.7 degrees.
Ill upload vid of results when its done.
 

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