Lagering in a freezer without freezing the beer

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Sadu

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Long story short, my brewing fridge can't cool properly so I talked SWMBO into a new food fridge and I get the old one. So I now have a great brewing fridge, and one with a working freezer but the fridge part cools poorly, and I probably shouldn't work it too hard or it will die.

Trying to decide the best config to use these in but some space for bottle lagering is real high on my agenda (I won't be kegging anytime soon).

Questions:
1. Lets say I temp-control the old freezer for lagering bottles. How do people ensure that things don't accidentally get too cold and the beer gets frozen? Seems the margin between frozen/wrecked beer and proper lagering temperatures is very slim. Where is the best place for a STC-1000 probe? Don't want to age my nice beers for 6 months and find they are bricked from cold-spots in the freezer:(

2. If I permanently mount a fan pointing at the compressor, does that help things? I noticed it was getting very warm.

3. If the fridge does die, what do people use them for? Seems that an insulated dark cupboard could actually be useful, even without cooling capacity.

Any advice appreciated.
 
Lucky for you (and the fish in lakes), enthalpy of fusion for water is 333 J/g and heat capacity of water 4.2 J/g/K. So basically it takes 80 times amount of energy to freeze a certain amount of water than it takes to cool it 1 degree Centigrade (about 2 deg F).

Long story short, my brewing fridge can't cool properly so I talked SWMBO into a new food fridge and I get the old one. So I now have a great brewing fridge, and one with a working freezer but the fridge part cools poorly, and I probably shouldn't work it too hard or it will die.

Trying to decide the best config to use these in but some space for bottle lagering is real high on my agenda (I won't be kegging anytime soon).

Questions:
1. Lets say I temp-control the old freezer for lagering bottles. How do people ensure that things don't accidentally get too cold and the beer gets frozen? Seems the margin between frozen/wrecked beer and proper lagering temperatures is very slim. Where is the best place for a STC-1000 probe? Don't want to age my nice beers for 6 months and find they are bricked from cold-spots in the freezer:(

2. If I permanently mount a fan pointing at the compressor, does that help things? I noticed it was getting very warm.

3. If the fridge does die, what do people use them for? Seems that an insulated dark cupboard could actually be useful, even without cooling capacity.

Any advice appreciated.
 
Lucky for you (and the fish in lakes), enthalpy of fusion for water is 333 J/g and heat capacity of water 4.2 J/g/K. So basically it takes 80 times amount of energy to freeze a certain amount of water than it takes to cool it 1 degree Centigrade (about 2 deg F).

OK, I think I see where this is going.

So lets say I set the controller to 32f and beer freezes at 29f (which is my understanding).

You are saying that if things got accidentally a bit cold it would take a LOT of extra cooling to go from 29f liquid to 29f solid?

So if there are cool spots in the freezer or the temp controller isn't calibrated perfectly there is a bit of a buffer to protect against this? And it's not so much of a real-world issue? If so, cool.

I think everyone has tried cooling beer in the freezer before and accidentally ended up with a messy ice-block, but then freezers are normally a lot colder than 32f.
 
OK, I think I see where this is going.

So lets say I set the controller to 32f and beer freezes at 29f (which is my understanding).

You are saying that if things got accidentally a bit cold it would take a LOT of extra cooling to go from 29f liquid to 29f solid?

So if there are cool spots in the freezer or the temp controller isn't calibrated perfectly there is a bit of a buffer to protect against this? And it's not so much of a real-world issue? If so, cool.

I think everyone has tried cooling beer in the freezer before and accidentally ended up with a messy ice-block, but then freezers are normally a lot colder than 32f.

cold spots is a whole different thing of course. You should calibrate a bit - maybe with water filled kegs?

My point is that it will happen slowly but of course could happen and does happen. I froze my beer (still in fermentor) once because the thermal probe got moved outside the freezer and so the freezer kicked in trying to lower the temperature and froze the beer (actually wort with yeast in it) overnight. Surprisingly, that didn't kill the yeast or produce any off-flavors - once I thawed the beer, it started happily fermenting again.
 
Long story short, my brewing fridge can't cool properly so I talked SWMBO into a new food fridge and I get the old one. So I now have a great brewing fridge, and one with a working freezer but the fridge part cools poorly, and I probably shouldn't work it too hard or it will die.

Trying to decide the best config to use these in but some space for bottle lagering is real high on my agenda (I won't be kegging anytime soon).

Questions:
1. Lets say I temp-control the old freezer for lagering bottles. How do people ensure that things don't accidentally get too cold and the beer gets frozen? Seems the margin between frozen/wrecked beer and proper lagering temperatures is very slim. Where is the best place for a STC-1000 probe? Don't want to age my nice beers for 6 months and find they are bricked from cold-spots in the freezer:(

2. If I permanently mount a fan pointing at the compressor, does that help things? I noticed it was getting very warm.

3. If the fridge does die, what do people use them for? Seems that an insulated dark cupboard could actually be useful, even without cooling capacity.

Any advice appreciated.

Did you defrost the fridge first to make sure the flapper or fan that cools the fridge with air from the freezer is free and working?

Thats what sounds like is wrong... or the $2 fan has failed.. If the freezer is working than the fridge is far from on its way out... you just need to pull the plastic cover off in the middle of the back of the freezer and investigate... usually a water spill gets in there from an ice cube tray and causes things to freeze.

I say just fix the fridge and control the whole thing with an stc probe mounted in or on your fermenter...
 
I say just fix the fridge and control the whole thing with an stc probe mounted in or on your fermenter...

I think I found the issue - the fridge seems to have got stuck in or in between defrost cycles. Manually turned the defrost timer and it's been working good again.

So now I have 2 working fridges = LAGER TIME :rockin:
 

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