Szimdars

Recipes 

Does anyone have any tips/tricks to help with temperature control that might be cheap or easy? Not quite ready enough to invest in anything major, but what simple things might you do to help keep the yeast where you need em?

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Primary: Ancho Smoked Chocolate Pumpkin Pie Porter; Hickory Smoked Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter
Secondary: Trippel Double Belgian I.P.A; American-Style Pale Ale
Bottles: Maibock, American Amber, Cran-Apple spiced Cyser, Standard E.S.B., American I.P.A., Cardamom-Citrus Belgian Wit

Clanchief

Recipes 

I use a brew belt. It will largely depend on the yeast you use and the temperature that they need, but if you go with yeast that live a little warmer, this is a great tool.

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Three-Fold Brewing
Primary 1 - Red Hand Ale
Primary 2 - Winternight Ale
Primary 3 - Wax's California Common
Drinking - Way too many different beers to list...

PIGMAN

Recipes 

Do a search for swamp coolers. You'll find a lot of posts on the subject. They work.

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PIGMO'S BREWPUB


Primary: RIS
Bottled:
Drinking: Caribou Slobber, Cream Ale, The Innkeeper, Sweet Stout, IPA, American Pale Ale, English Bitter

HopSong

Recipes 

I'm not worried about hot right now.. so no swamp cooler needed. But cold? I have my FV sitting on plywood over the bathtub.. The FV is covered with a plastic garbage can. Contains temps as best it can. Once I see the temp of the wort dropping I run an extension cord to the can and put an adapter inside that I have a couple of 7w nite lites plugged into. To keep the light from the FV I cover the lights loosely with alum foil.. If it gets too warm, I can either unplug it or just turn off one of the lights.

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Cheers, Bill
Hop Song Brewing

A fine beer may be judged with only one sip, but it's better to be thoroughly sure.

Bottled n Kegged 2 APA's, Milk Stout
Brewing: zippo
Up Next: APA, Dry Stout

solbes

Recipes 

Other things you might be able to use, heating pad on very low w/ some towels in between (otherwise too hot). I use a seed germination mat, that can heat the beer another 5 degrees warmer or so. I think it's a 23 watt model, so pretty efficient too. A lot of people use incadescent bulbs.

For cooling, placing the bucket in another vessel, filling with water up to 1/2 the bucket height works well. I just swapped 2 gatorade bottles that were frozen and it worked well for me in August. I had a total of 4, so 2 were always in the freezer. Now I inherited a free mini fridge and bought a digital temp controller. It's working perfect to keep my Kolsch at 60 on the nose!

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Primary #1: Empty #2: Empty
Secondary #1: Belgian Golden Strong #2: Dark Belgian Strong #3: Empty #4: Framboise Lambic
Kegged: RedHook ESB clone, Fat Tire Amber
Bottles: Surly Furious clone, Kicked by a Moose Scotch Ale, Apfelwein, Russian Imperial Stout, Trappist Dubbel, Carmelite Tripel
On Deck: Kölsch IV, Altbier II

arg

Recipes 

There's a good BrewingTV episode called "Happiness is a warm carboy" that details using a big plastic tub (cheap) filled with water (very cheap) and an aqaurium heater stick (maybe $20?) to maintain warmer temps.

bomberman

Recipes 

What are you looking to do, raise or lower temps? For keeping things cool, I've been looking at building a fermentation chamber, but they can be somewhat of an investment, so for my next batch I plan to swamp cooler/air conditioner setup that should keep things in the 60f range. You can search swamp cooler on here and find a lot of easy to build setups.

smalliewader

Recipes 

That's an awesome idea. I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to warm things up a bit lately....I can't believe I didn't think of that for my swamp cooler.

It's that time of year where the heat isn't running much, so the beer is sitting between 62-64*. I need to bump it up a few degrees, that aquarium heater sounds like the perfect solution.

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Homercidal

Recipes 

OP lives in TX?? I'm guessing a brew belt or heater is not going to be on the equipment list!

Apendecto

Recipes 

Unless you are trying to get yeast esters, I wouldn't mess with temperature at all. Fermentation will warm up your vessel 5-10 degrees F and that puts you in a lot of ale yeasts perfect range. I'm all for fermenting cooler than warmer.