Fermentation Chamber

Brent Dowell

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I haven't brewed beer since 2001. I used to brew fairly often. I did 10 gallon all grain batches. Generally a pale ale, but I would branch out from time to time.

Doing 10 gallon batches was kind of a pain because I'd have to split the wort up into 2 fermenters.

Apparently these 15 gallon plastic conicals are pretty popular anymore, and not to expensive, so I picked one up.

But I needed a stand for it. In addition, it really helps if you can control the ambient temperature during fermentation. Too high a temp can cause off flavors to develop. so I built this box and lined it with styrofoam insulation. It has a couple of 4" vent holes cut into it. I will connect these vents with insulated ductwork to my 'keezer'.

(A keezer is a chest freezer that is used to store kegged beer in. You use an external temperature control to keep the beer at serving temperature. Typically you remove the lid and make a wooden collar about 6 inches tall that goes around the top of the freezer. You use that collar to mount the taps to, so you don't have to drill holes in the freezer.)

I'll use a thermostatically controlled pc fan to keep the fermentation chamber at my desired temperature.

In theory, this will allow me to brew and ferment beer all year round now, even during the heat of summer. In winter I can use a small heat mat to keep the temperature up high enough for fermentation.

Getting closer to being ready to brew again! Actually, I'll be brewing first thing in the morning...


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Perhaps at Burning Wood you could give some lessons, I could easily be pushed over the edge to take up the hobby. My wife would prefer that I try doing wine, will have to see if there are enough similarities in equipment to do both.

BTW, the chamber looks good. Looking forward to seeing it in person.
 
Interesting setup. Ever tried brewing a Porter? My favorite type of beer.

I've brewed porters, stouts, fruit beers, pale ales, 'lawn mowing' beer, oktoberfests, mead, cider, and probably a bunch of others I can't really remember. Going all grain really pushed the quality of the beer up several notches for me. Once I get the process down again, I'll probably branch out to other styles and do some smaller batches as well.

Perhaps at Burning Wood you could give some lessons, I could easily be pushed over the edge to take up the hobby. My wife would prefer that I try doing wine, will have to see if there are enough similarities in equipment to do both.

BTW, the chamber looks good. Looking forward to seeing it in person.

I'll have all the equipment there, so I certainly could do a demo. It's about the only thing I could do a demo on, with my sadly lacking woodworking skills. :rofl:
 
Equipment cleaning is done.
Test runs of pump and boilers and chillers and heat exchanger are done.
Fermenter has been nuked with bleach. Verbal run through of all steps has been done.
All that's left is to enjoy the rest of the day and wake up early and start grinding grain and to 'git-r-dun'!


I think I will setup the timelapse camera for tomorrow, that should be a hoot.


By this time tomorrow, I will be able to call myself a 'brewer' once again.
 
Looking good Brent! :thumb: Be interesting to see how the fan recirculation works, sure sounds like a winner of an idea :thumb:. I can't do it this way because while I'm allowed the kegerator in the living room I think the fermentation chamber would push it a bit to far :D

My wife would prefer that I try doing wine, will have to see if there are enough similarities in equipment to do both.

The overlap approaches 100% for the basics. The main difference is you need some extra equipment for the beer (primarily a large pot for boiling it in, at least for a simple extract batch) and a bit of different chemicals (adjuncts if you will) for the wine (and a corker for the wine vs a capper for the beer, although I suppose you could crown cap wine if you were so inclined :D). You can get 5g wine kits (concentrated grape juice essentially) for around ~$40-50 which isn't to bad of a deal, I mostly do fruit wines because they're more interesting to do and also a lot cheaper if you can get cheap fruit :D. A beginner beer setup runs around $200 and includes the basic equipment you'd use to do wine as well excepting a corker. On the flip side a batch of wine takes around 3-6 months before you bottle it and ~most~ beers take ~2 weeks so a lot of people add some more fermenters (around $25 each).

For the beginning beer fermentologist I recommend reading: http://www.howtobrew.com/ I usually recommend making the beer described in Section 2 first (but read section 1) as its no really any harder and is a lot better in general. I don't know of as concise of an intro online for wine.
 
And there we go.

The fermenter is filled with 11 gallons of a slightly darkish slightly higher gravity pale ale. Let's hope it starts fermenting quickly and completely quite soon!

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Should have taken the autofocus off and put it on manual mode. Oh well.

Here's 6 hours of my day reduced to 3 minutes.

 
Hey this is so coool, I love a beer that has some flavor and nutrition.:) Looking forward to seeing the setup and sampling the product of your hard labor. That is if its ready by Burning Woods and if there is any left. ;)

I tried brewing back in SA once but it was nothing like your scale. I had purchased beer in a bag, in the UK on a business trip from a Drug store chain called Boots. This was a hessian bag with a plastic liner that had all the ingredients in and all you did was add water and hang behind a door for x period. Did not turn out to be drinkable. :rofl:

Then i had a go at it here in Canada at one of the places we have where you can make your own beer and wine. You actually get to save huge doing it. All ingredients are fresh and provided so you can make your own recipe. Only problem was batch size. It made way too much for my personal consumption within the time that it had for shelf life. So i was drinking more than i wanted and giving it away by the case. Decided i have enough of a stomach as it is without making it worse so gave it up.

Whats the smallest amount you can do in your setup that makes it work? Is the recipe scaleable? Looking at your video i think i have most of the equipment. Turkey frier comes in handy eh?
 
It's possible to brew pretty much any size you want. There are guys that brew as small as 1 gallon batches on up. I used to do 10 gallon batches, so that's what I did this time. Of course, at that point in time I was working in downtown san francisco and was known to bring beer in for group parties, etc. Always went over well with my group of friends. Of course we are all scattered now, so not much reason to brew in such large quantities.

I can definitely do smaller batches, and will probably scale down to 5 gallon batches, so I can keep a little more variety on hand. Ideally, my goal would be to quit buying the commercial stuff, with the exception of some special beers now and then. At least making my own would make me get some exercise!

I'll be kegging this beer into stainless steel 'soda kegs'. While the shelf life is not indefinite, kept properly chilled they will last quite a while like that.

The combination of doing 10 gallon batches and kegging really simplifies the whole process and makes it pretty quick and efficient. The only problem is there is a couple week pipeline between making and consuming :huh:

My system is a '2 tier single pump HERMS' (HERMS = Heat Exchanging Recirculating Mash System).

Basically, I have a copper coil in the turkey fryer on the left filled with water. I can pump the mash liquid through that coil and use that to raise the mash temperature pretty easily.

I was surprised how well things went. I had a couple of oops type moments, but things seemed to work out just fine. I had about a 70% efficient extract of the sugars from the malted barley. I used to get up on the high 80s, so I have a little work to do.

This Saturday is National Home Brew Day, so I'll be brewing another batch then as well. I should be able to have a couple of varieties on tap for BW come June.
 
:thumb: :thumb: :D

Imho less than 5g is generally not worth the time/effort although I have done some 1g and 3g experimental batches they take about as long to do and there is more loss % wise and well.. yeah.. OTOH 10g is a LOT of beer... so I usually don't do anything that big anymore unless we're having an event of some sort or you can split it and use different yeasts as an experiment which is interesting. Shelf life is highly dependent on the beer, for example a Belgian Whitbier is best for maybe a month tops after which it really starts to go downhill. OTOH I have some beers that weren't really getting good until they were over a year old :D
 
Well, The siphoning of cold air from the keezer just wasn't working for me.

So, Found a little 5000btu AC Unit on sale for a little over 100$.

Bada bing, bada boom, cut a hole, mount it, and now I should be able to maintain the temp in here pretty easily.

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Well Shoot, disabling the internal thermostat on that was easy. This old design Analog unit has a little copper bulb type thermostat right there on the coils. You can just barely see it in the picture.

I took the ac out, took the front grill off and was able to very carefully move that bulb to the bottom of the ac unit OUTSIDE the fermentation chamber.

What that means is now my little STC-1000 temperature controller can just run and run and run until it hits the temp I need. I don't think I have to worry about the AC unit freezing up, because I'm only trying to cool a very, very small space.

The STC-1000 is a general purpose temperature control unit that can be used to either heat or cool. It's not a pid, but it does have one very valuable setting. That setting is a compressor delay. If you use something like the STC-1000 to control say a freezer, or an AC unit, it's very important to make sure that it does not get into a situation where it can 'short cycle' the compressor. I.e. turn it on/off too frequently. I've set the compressor delay to 5 minutes. That means that whenever the AC unit runs, the controller will not turn it on again, no matter what happens to the temperature, until 5 minutes has passsed. Very useful in makeing sure you don't burn out the compressor unit.
 
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