Conicals

How do you regulate the temp of a beer fermenting in a stainless steel conical? What is the benefits and drawbacks of using a conical?

Well I guess you could use a full sized fridge as a fermentation chamber, or some specially built one? Obviously the so called swamp cooler doesn't really have much use. I have one conical and it won't get used until late fall when my garage or basement temps are below 70F.

I have been always curious how you clean a 15 gallon one, if it is in let's say a fridge...

How do you regulate the temp of a beer fermenting in a stainless steel conical? What is the benefits and drawbacks of using a conical?

Click to expand...

I put the whole conical in the refrig with a 3 foot section of Flex Watt Heat Tape, wrapped tightly around it. The tape is then hooked up to a Johnson Contoller. The thermal probe is then put into the thermal well with a dab of heat sink paste. The accuracy and amount of control you have with this is quite impressive.

Now I can hear people saying.. well that is a lot of thermal mass to be putting in a fridge. This method works fantastic for me.

Conicals are a bit tricky to be honest, I am still perfecting using mine. One of the problems everyone runs into is the trub clogging up the bottom port, the best way to resolve this is with frequent mini dumps. Still working on the right schedule to keep things flowing.

When the beer is ready to keg, simply remove the airlock and stick in my modified paintball CO2 tank and push the beer out to the keg. Little to no O2 exposure.



The main benefit is, a fancy stainless steel toy. This is not a required item by any stretch of the imagination. That said I really like mine.

How do you clean it?

jbsengineer said:

How do you clean it?

Click to expand...

The main body is not connected to the legs, it separates for easy access. I use soap and water followed up with a rub down with barkeepers friend to keep the steel conditioned. The valves are taken apart, cleaned and boiled. This takes me somewhere around 30 minutes to complete the breakdown and reassembly. The conical is from Stout and the quality and durability is very good, the wall thickness alone is about three times the size of my kettles. Definitely heavy gauge steel.

One thing I do not like about the design is the conical comes in direct contact with the holder, which will cause scratching. Do yourself a favor and go buy some sticky felt pads from the hardware store and this will not happen.