Temperature Control Stir Plate

ClaudiusB has this amazing stir plate in his brewery, it is temperature controlled and constantly feeds the yeast batch filtered oxygen. After months of drinking together, he was nice enough to convert a small red bull fridge I had lying around in the garage. Due to my adolescent knowledge of wiring and everything having to do with electrical, he showed me how to make it.

Though in the end he did almost everything, kudos to Claudiusb!
Grew my first yeast on this puppy last week for a Belgium triple, works like a charm.

Um yeah that is so ****ing cool. Much better than my POS stir plate.

I likes to.

Sweet!

Nice!! I want.

I wanted one for a long time to, going to harvest some pac man yeast with it today!

Isn't it a tad overkill? My understanding is that you just cover the stir plate with foil and no need to worry about the oxygen after that.

Yeah a bit over kill, but worth it. Kind of a reproduction of what the big boys do.

Overkill is what our hobby is all about!

Ok I am really loosing you at the temp controlled O2 part. I get the automatic infusion of O2 but what does the temp have to do with it? Wouldn't it be better to put the O2 on a timer so every so often it injects O2?

That is a neat use of an old Red Bull fridge any way you look at it...

EDIT: It would be cool to cold crash it inside the thing...

The idea is to not have the yeast go over a huge temperature change, you can go ahead and slowly crash cool this, decant then raise the temp up slowly to the temperature of your ready made wort.

It is not pure oxygen that is being injected into the starter, but filtered air coming from a pump. You are right if you added pure oxygen constantly you would kill the yeast off in no time.

GodsStepBrother said:

The idea is to not have the yeast go over a huge temperature change, you can go ahead and slowly crash cool this, decant then raise the temp up slowly to the temperature of your ready made wort.

It is not pure oxygen that is being injected into the starter, but filtered air coming from a pump. You are right if you added pure oxygen constantly you would kill the yeast off in no time.

Click to expand...

I started to figure it out but thanks for clarifying. The Idea is really cool. I will be looking to do something similar if I ever find a unit like that.

Out of curiosity I noticed that you have a 1L flask do you think it would be big enough to run x2 2L or 4L flasks? thanks!

The most it can fit is a 2L flask. We were originally going to build a stir plate and just fit it inside. Then the 2L flask would not fit, so he ended up just building the stir plate into the fridge to allow a 2 liter flask ample room. Only enough room for 1 though.

Claudius on the other hand has a bigger one.