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- Aug 7, 2014
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I recently upped my brew game from a 5-gallon batch size rig featuring a Rubbermaid cooler mash tun and a cut-open ½-bbl keg boil kettle that sat on a turkey fryer burner. I've spent the best part of a year building it, but I now have an automated ½-bbl electric 3-kettle HERMS rig. I used Ss Brewtech kettles, and I went with the BruControl automation system that uses an Arduino-based microcontroller. Here's a pic of the new rig:
A couple of years ago, I built a fermentation chamber centered around a donor fridge that crapped out within two months of commissioning the damn thing. Naturally, the closest replacement fridge I could find didn't fit. The box got buried in a corner of the garage.
Along the way, I was given an old countertop soda dispenser that had a ½ hp compressor and a 10-gallon ice bath. I converted it into a glycol chiller:
I built a small heat exchanger using a transmission cooler and a couple of 4" 105 cfm muffin fans:
The advent of the new brewstand meant that I would need a new ferm chamber sooner rather than later. Brewing in Florida in the summer kind of forces your hand that way. I was able to re-use the old ferm chamber by dropping a small pond pump into the glycol reservoir and pumping cold glycol through the heat exchanger. My first batch out of the new brewstand was an oatmeal stout that I put into my glass carboys and into the now-repowered ferm chamber. Disaster struck when I was lowering one of the carboys into the box and the bottom broke clean off, dropping five gallons of a really nice stout into the ferm chamber in about one second. After cleanup, the ferm chamber worked great, and after racking into kegs, I dropped the temperature and used a picnic tap off of the two remaining kegs. The beer was awesome, but I still had lots of room for improvement.
After the disaster, I permanently swore off glass carboys. I switched to 60-liter Speidel fermenters. Trouble ensued when I figured out that I could not fit two of the fermenters and the heat exchanger into the existing chamber.
I went back to the drawing board. The result is a box that is about 54" x 33" on the outside, and has an interior volume of about 30 cubic feet:
I built it using 2 x 4 studs and plywood, with 3" of foam board insulation across top, bottom, and sides. It holds the two fermenters and the heat exchanger quite comfortably:
I'm going to extend the length of the old box to the point where I can fit two fermenters and a redesigned and custom-fit heat exchanger, and use it for fermentation. The new box is going to become a keezer, and will be able to hold 12 Corny kegs, which will give me room for four full batches of beer at a time, across four taps. One may become a nitro tap for the ability to keep a proper stout on tap permanently.
I brewed my first-ever lager last Sunday. The batch is spread across two of the Speidels, and is sitting in the new box at 58℉ right now. This morning at 10:00, I bumped the temperature by five degrees to start heading toward an eight-day diacetyl rest at 65℉.
This is where the title of the post comes in. The 3" of insulation is so effective that the glycol pump and muffin fans didn't kick in until almost 5pm!
The last pic is of a 4-hour graph of the glycol bath temp, the fermenter temp, and the HX temp. Everything is nice and stable, and on its way to getting kegged soon!
A couple of years ago, I built a fermentation chamber centered around a donor fridge that crapped out within two months of commissioning the damn thing. Naturally, the closest replacement fridge I could find didn't fit. The box got buried in a corner of the garage.
Along the way, I was given an old countertop soda dispenser that had a ½ hp compressor and a 10-gallon ice bath. I converted it into a glycol chiller:
I built a small heat exchanger using a transmission cooler and a couple of 4" 105 cfm muffin fans:
The advent of the new brewstand meant that I would need a new ferm chamber sooner rather than later. Brewing in Florida in the summer kind of forces your hand that way. I was able to re-use the old ferm chamber by dropping a small pond pump into the glycol reservoir and pumping cold glycol through the heat exchanger. My first batch out of the new brewstand was an oatmeal stout that I put into my glass carboys and into the now-repowered ferm chamber. Disaster struck when I was lowering one of the carboys into the box and the bottom broke clean off, dropping five gallons of a really nice stout into the ferm chamber in about one second. After cleanup, the ferm chamber worked great, and after racking into kegs, I dropped the temperature and used a picnic tap off of the two remaining kegs. The beer was awesome, but I still had lots of room for improvement.
After the disaster, I permanently swore off glass carboys. I switched to 60-liter Speidel fermenters. Trouble ensued when I figured out that I could not fit two of the fermenters and the heat exchanger into the existing chamber.
I went back to the drawing board. The result is a box that is about 54" x 33" on the outside, and has an interior volume of about 30 cubic feet:
I built it using 2 x 4 studs and plywood, with 3" of foam board insulation across top, bottom, and sides. It holds the two fermenters and the heat exchanger quite comfortably:
I'm going to extend the length of the old box to the point where I can fit two fermenters and a redesigned and custom-fit heat exchanger, and use it for fermentation. The new box is going to become a keezer, and will be able to hold 12 Corny kegs, which will give me room for four full batches of beer at a time, across four taps. One may become a nitro tap for the ability to keep a proper stout on tap permanently.
I brewed my first-ever lager last Sunday. The batch is spread across two of the Speidels, and is sitting in the new box at 58℉ right now. This morning at 10:00, I bumped the temperature by five degrees to start heading toward an eight-day diacetyl rest at 65℉.
This is where the title of the post comes in. The 3" of insulation is so effective that the glycol pump and muffin fans didn't kick in until almost 5pm!
The last pic is of a 4-hour graph of the glycol bath temp, the fermenter temp, and the HX temp. Everything is nice and stable, and on its way to getting kegged soon!
