Overall, today was a good day for beer.

Initially today's brew day started off bad.
1) My LHBS didn't have all the grains I needed to brew Double W stout, so we had to sub most things.
2) I made a yeast slurry starter that over flowed twice - once in my kitchen sink and once on the downstairs carpet.
3) I messed up steeping my grains. I tried to mash my .5lb rye and ended up with a 90min steep between 140-152deg with a 185deg half gallon mash out. Long story involving two trips to the store - one for a digital thermometer and one for batteries.
4) I dropped an entire (unopened) container of LME into the brew pot during boil, so I had to fish that out of boiling water and clean up all the splash mess.
5) I added too much ice to cool down my wort, so I missed hitting 1.124 OG, and ended up with nearly 6gal of 1.116.

After all that, my brewday was quite a let down, or so I thought...

1) Upon pitching my highly active yeast cake, I had air lock activity (around one bubble a second) within 20min!
2) My swamp cooler that my Oktoberfest is lagering in, is down to 42deg. I have three 2L bottles that I swap out, one every 8hrs. I'm now taking out bottles that still have ice in them. It's taken me three days to go from 77deg during the D-rest to 42. Tomorrow I will be in the 30's! Yes it's insulated well.

Those two wins really helped improve my spirits. Oh, and my friend gave me two Sanke kegs a few days ago that he used to hold up his dilapidated fence for the past three years. They're still partially filled with beer.

Sounds like a win. Let us know how the beer in the keg is.

The beer turned out fine. Both my pops and I really like it.

tally350z said:

Sounds like a win. Let us know how the beer in the keg is.

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It's gross! It got cold enough I was able to depress the ball valve by hand and out gushed that old beer. I figured I'd take a quick taste of the stuff dripping off my fingers and am glad I didn't ingest any more than that.

In case you're wondering, I also smell and taste leaked liquids from under the car. Evolutionally speaking, I haven't progressed much past the point of eating dirt.

Do you by chance have any pictures of your swamp cooler? I'd be interested in seeing what it looks like. I have trouble keeping mine below about 60degrees. There's no way that I could even think about lagering in it.

The key is insulation. I used an ordinary 20'ish gallon plastic container that looks a LOT like this one.

Picked it up at walmart for 6 or 7 bucks.

-I put it in my basement which stayed in the mid to upper 60's, so that helped.
-I folded a few bath towels into squares to put the bucket on.
-I wrapped the bucket in 3 or 4 nicely folded bath towels and then wrapped a couple large bungee cords around it to hold the towels in place.
-I found a plastic lid to a different container that had a hole in the middle, large enough for the neck of the carboy to stick through.
-The whole thing (top and sides) was then covered in a huge, thick, acrylic blanket that is somewhat water resistant. It was folded and wrapped snugly around the bucket, then held in place by wedging it against the wall.

When swapping ice bottles, I would have to undo a small portion of the blanket just enough so I could move the lid and replace the bottles. I found I didn't have quite enough surface area using only 2L bottles, so in order to hit the upper 30's, I would swap 2L and 20oz bottles. I could still hit 40-41 with only 2L's. After 6-8hrs, the bottles I pulled out were still at least 1/2 to 3/4 frozen. Usually the 2L bottles had about 1/2" of water around the ice mass in the middle.

I'll do it again this summer and take pictures.