What do you use to increase temps of your FV safely? heat belt? light?

[mattjm]

In case you are interested, this is what it looks like maintaining 18c. Again the way it acts would be slightly different with the fermenter full of actively fermenting beer due to the greater thermal inertia and heat produced by fermentation however the result of maintaining an almost exact set point without any differential or over/undershoot would be the same.

 

[Rocker1986]

Yes and I imagine the fridge temp does exactly the same thing in my situation with the probe taped to the fermenter underneath foam. I don't really care what others do, I was just agreeing with Galbrew that there are other things much more important to the outcome of a beer than controlling fermentation temperature to that level of precision. Obviously your setup allows that even though it's sort of measuring the ambient, but for those who simply use the STC, it is better to have it taped to the FV than just dangling in the fridge, and it won't make any difference to the beer.

You would have to experiment with the yeast yourself to get that answer. However I do think that there are liquid strains out there that are nicer than US-05. I've actually done an identical recipe once with 1056 in a starter and once with US-05 simply re-hydrated and I preferred the 1056 version. There wasn't a huge difference but it was noticeable and the 1056 beer was a little bit nicer; perhaps because it was pitched at the proper rate.

Temp control, while not as precise as yours, was definitely a big improvement on my beers, but getting into building up yeast cultures with starters for each batch has seen them improve even more. Now I'm just getting into the water chemistry side of things, not that I've ever had any issues with the water but it's interesting to see what different additives do to the finished beer. So I'm just experimenting with some batches.

 

[GalBrew]

To me you are missing quite a bit and I am suprised how accurate you and gal believe an stc 1000 with temp probe measuring the beer actually is as it has very little to do with the accuracy of the controller and alot more to do with the fact you are attempting to control the fridge based on the slower moving medium. are you using a differential of .5deg and cycling the fridge in when it reaches .5c above set point and cycling off at set point?

As far as the yeast/water chemistry I am actually quite interested in this I just have not moved to fully refining this part of my process. So by saying I would see such remarkable difference in my beer are you sugesting for APA's which I tend to favour, I would see a massive difference from changing from Safale us-05 (which im currently quite happy with) and substituting it with wyeast 1056?

How accurate an STC-1000 connected to a fridge with the probe in a thermowell doesn't really matter. What does matter is that I can consistently control my fermentation to produce the flavour profile that I desire in my finished beer. I always test the actual temp of the wort/beer when I take a sample so I know exactly what the temp differential is between the readout on the STC-1000 and the actual temp (which changes with fermentation activity) and can adjust accordingly.

On the topic of yeast, the difference between a packet of s-05 and 1056 with an appropriate sized starter is quite remarkable. Give it a go, you won't regret it.