Advice needed: ice water bath for fermentation temp. control

Hello all

Summer is upon us here in north america. I am looking forward to brew a Hefeweizen, and need the temp to reach around 18C (65F), however the room temperature in my a/c-less apartment is 78F (yikes).

I havn't tried the cold water bath trick yet. Basically, the idea is to immerse the fermentation vessel in a cold water bath, cooled by blocks of ice contained in pop bottles. A cool temperature is maintained by regularly exchanging the iced pop bottles.

Does anyone have experience that they can share? No amount of detail is redundant.

Thank you

I don't have the link with me here at work, but I followed the direction posted on another board as a way to modify a Ice Cube cooler for this, and it has been working great for me. Fill with cold water, needed one 20oz bottle of ice and cooled it from 73 room temp to 65 water temp no problem.

I will post the link when I get home if someone else doesn't do so first.

Before I bought my fermentation freezer, I just used a decent sized Igloo cooler. I put the fermenter in the cooler and filled it with water then covered it with a t-shirt. I was able to keep the fermentation temp at 66F without a problem by adding ice cubes twice a day. I'd usually just dump 2 trays of cubes in and sometimes a freezer pack as well.

This is what I did:

http://www.brewboard.com/index.php?showtopic=60288