Cold Crashing In a Swamp Cooler

Hi Everyone,

I want to clear up my APA before it goes into the bottles. My issue is that I do not have a fridge to cold crash in. Just my trusty 50 gallon rubbermade bin.

What would you suggest as far as getting the temp down? I am assuming it would be lots of ice and draining the water from time to time.

How long should I cold crash?

Will this affect the amount of yeast for bottling time?

Is crash cooling really worth my time?

Should I just RDWHAHB?

Crash cooling does help clear up your beer, but there are other options as well. At times, I will transfer to a secondary for a few days and add gelatin to the secondary. After 2-3 days, it'll be crystal clear for the most part. I've also heard using Polyclar will help clear up a batch of beer just as it would wine, but just be careful as this will affect the amount of yeast suspended (especially when using Polyclar).

I suppose you could also cold crash the beer using a swamp cooler. The temperatures in the swamp cooler may not be low enough to truely "cold crash" your beer. I guess as long as you can get about 10F lower than your lowest fermentation temps you'll be good, but I'm unsure as to how much of a temp differential you'll actually get with a swamp cooler.

I have had zero luck with gelatin actually helping to clarify, but that's just been my experience.

I have cold crashed in a swamp cooler before. In fact, I just did this last week. I first drained all the existing water from doing my temperature control, and filled it up to the top of the fermenter with ice. Once the ice had melted down a bit, I filled it up to the top again. Note that I didn't drain any additional water; I just added more ice. Rinse, lather, repeat and after a day or so my internal fermenter temp was around 40*F. Once it was there, I could maintain that temp pretty easily just by occasionally adding a frozen water bottle or two.

weirdboy said:

I have had zero luck with gelatin actually helping to clarify, but that's just been my experience.

I have cold crashed in a swamp cooler before. In fact, I just did this last week. I first drained all the existing water from doing my temperature control, and filled it up to the top of the fermenter with ice. Once the ice had melted down a bit, I filled it up to the top again. Note that I didn't drain any additional water; I just added more ice. Rinse, lather, repeat and after a day or so my internal fermenter temp was around 40*F. Once it was there, I could maintain that temp pretty easily just by occasionally adding a frozen water bottle or two.

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How long did you do this for?

It took about a day to get the temp down to 40, then I kept it there for another 2 days before bottling. I could have easily maintained that temp indefinitely, though, assuming I would be around to swap out the ice bottles. I still had plenty of ice floating in the water after 2 days.

This just kinda struck me, never tried it before, but it might be worth a shot. What would happen if you were to add some rock salt onto the ice? Similar to an homemade ice cream machine? Although you may end up have to replace the ice more often due to melting. Just a thought. Anyone every tried this?

Yes absolutely it will lower the freezing point, but I didn't want to do that as I was worried that my beer might actually get *too* cold.