DIY glycol chilled plastic conical fermenters

It's ~120-140 degree PBW to clean and then ~120-140 degree iodophor to sanitize. If you look at the temp graphs you can see the temp spike from when I ran the cleaner through the conicals.

 

I use hot tap water and generic oxyclean to clean and cold water and star San to sanitize. I have not had any issues in the three years I have been using mine.

 

I am really glad you guys had different experiences than we did.

BTW: Really enjoy the chiller write up. Planning on doing that in the near future, but likely in a different way kind of.

 

Disaster strikes:



I spent all day yesterday brewing a Kolsch and a German Pils. Put everything in the conicals, chilled to the appropriate temps, and pitched the yeast.

Woke up this morning and apparently the power went out briefly last night. My pils was at 78 degrees this morning. It may be drinkable long term, but these were for competition. So, it looks like I'll be dumping them and brewing again this weekend. Thankfully the decoction mash Hef I brewed should be alright though.

Edit: It also looks like I'm going to get around to insulating the conicals today...

 

I've been following this as I have my one and only plastic connical - not temperature controlled and I've been thinking about doing something - either a large enough ferm chamber or a stainless coil.

I don't mean to hijack the thread but I have one cleaning question:

I just fermented 10 gallons of what I thought was going to be possibly the best beer I've ever made - Maris otter based IPA (beautiful looking, samples tasted fantastic). It went from 1.058 to 1.015 fairly quickly with ECY Newark ale yeast. It then got super hot (probably 80 - 90 F) for a few days and I was unable to get it into a keg fast enough - I kegged it Saturday but it had developed a sour smell and some pellicle on top. I am pretty sure something got in and it got hot enough to start fermenting with something wild.

Am I stuck using this for sours from now on?

I was thinking of doing a soak with water and bleach to kill everything in there. Is this a good idea or will bleach make future fermentations a problem?

 

Doh! But don't dump them yet - let them finish fermenting and then evaluate? Or do you just not have enough time before submissions if you do need to re-brew?

 

I could, but a pilsner takes up a fermenter long enough as it is. I have way more homebrew than I can drink anyways. So, might as well make sure it's perfect. If I can find a bag of floor malted pilsner malt at my LHBS, I'll probably replace the German pils with a Czech pils. I have about 3/4 of a lb of Saaz in the freezer as it is, just need some authentic malt.

I might let the kolsch finish though. It was in the low 70s this morning and ferments higher than the pils anyways. So, it's worth the chance on that one.

In the mean time I have a german alt, a belgian pale, an american wheat, and 3 different versions of a german wheat I've been trying to perfect to enter in competitions. So, I'll definitely have options in the mean time.

 

Bleach will work. It's not stainless. So you won't have a problem with rust. I'd probably just let it soak for 24-48 hours with PBW and then clean it out with bleach + water. Be sure to rinse it well after you're done.

 

Oh no! Isn't there any way for the system to just go back to doing what it was doing prior to the failure? If not, are you considering hooking it up to a UPS?

 

Just make sure that none of the valves or anything else is stainless.

 

Insulation in place:



It's 1/2" neoprene cut to size. We'll see how well this works, but it appears to have stopped the condensation.

In other news, running pure water on a hot day is a bad idea. I checked the reservoir and the A/C coil had ~1" of ice on it. Added a couple gallons of glycol and it went away in 15 minutes. So, now it's officially a glycol system.

 

So, there are a couple things going on here:

1) The BCS-460 as designed (for whatever reason) will not resume where it left off when it comes back on from power loss. I think this stems from the fact that it's really made for automated brewing and not fermenting. If that were to happen in an automated brewing system, there could be bad consequences.

2) The load of an A/C is way too high for a UPS. I could rewire it to run the A/C off it's own outlet and everything else off a UPS. The end result is it would buy you more time as you have a reservoir of chilled liquid. However, I think that's kind of overkill.

Really, this was kind of a perfect storm around here. We've lost power maybe twice in the 3 years I've lived here (including last night) and never for more than 5-10 seconds. On top of that, ambient temps in the garage were 85-90 since we're going through a heat wave. If I had insulated the conicals ahead of time, it probably would have knocked 10 degrees off the top in the morning. Temporarily reaching 68 I could get away with. 78, I don't think so.

Some time in the future, I'd like to redesign the controller around a BeagleBone, which would give me a lot more power to work with and would remove the limitations of the BCS. However, starting in August, my free time is going to be extremely limited and I don't have nearly the time in the interim to teach myself everything I'd need for a BeagleBone.

So, in the mean time, I'll dump the german pils and brew a czech pils later this week. The design of this system has really cut in to my brew time lately and I really want to start experimenting with decoction mashes. So, that's where I'm going to spend a lot of my time.

I still have a few bits to insulate here and there, but for the most part, I'd call this project complete. I'm going to watch the temps tomorrow and see how much of a difference the insulation makes. Other than that, I need to replace the wifi repeater I used as it's overheating in the box.

 

Looks like a standby generator with auto transfer switch is in order!!

 

Well, the insulation makes a pretty huge difference.

Here's a temp graph prior to the insulation. The big spikes are from me disconnecting the temp probes to measure the fit.


and here's a graph after the insulation is in place:



Not too bad for a couple sheets of neoprene.

 

I've been planning pretty much this exact build out myself and just stumbled on this thread. Some good ideas for improvement on my design! Any chance you could elaborate a bit on the fittings you used to connect the IC to the quick connect studs? Compression to NPT Adapter? And do you have a good source for the quick disconnects? Also, what's the fitting you're using for the racking arm? Sorry for all the questions. Thanks for posting this!

 

The IC uses a regular 1/2" compression to NPT adapter, which the quick disconnects screw directly in to. I have a couple washers and an o-ring to keep it air tight in between.

I got the disconnects off ebay. They're expensive if you buy them individually, but I found a seller with 6 sets of them for $70.

I splurged a bit on the fitting for the racking arm and got the one piece weldless bulkhead compression fitting Brewers Hardware sells . Less chance for leaks that way.

Let me know if you need any more information. Always happy to help.

 

Here's where I got the couplings:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190816557823

$72 with free shipping. On the other end of the connection I just used a camlock to connect to the ball valve. That way I can replace or change the length of the tubing if I need to, but can still disconnect the conicals without spilling more than a few drops.

 

www.tf-valvefittings.com you can try this site. it support online sales.

 

To be honest, that's probably overkill. With the insulation in place, even the pilsner is staying within 2 degrees of its target for an hour and a half. The hef is more like 4-5 hours. If I had insulated it a day earlier, I most likely would have been fine. Looks like I won't be dumping the Kolsch though. My LHBS had to special order the floor malted pilsner malt for the czech pils and the dark wheat for the weizenbock I want to brew next. So, it'll be next weekend before I can brew anything. I guess we'll see how many off flavors a short stint in the low 70s imparted.

I took a taste test of the hef today though. It's tasting great so far. So, unless anything develops in the next week, that's going to competition.

 

What happens if you go out of town for the weekend and a 30 second power outage happens right after you leave? A little rewiring to power the bcs off a ups would give you piece of mind that a brief power outage won't shut down your cooling system. It wouldn't even need to run the pump or valves. It's just about not letting the bcs power down since it won't start up the program again automatically.

 

Before doing any complicated rewiring, I'd hold off for a little while. Version 4.0 of the BCS firmware is supposed to be out in the next couple months and it's a total rewrite of the code. One of the features they're supposedly working on is starting processes automatically on startup, which would make a UPS redundant.

 

That would be awesome if the update fixed this issue for you!

 

Here's a flow diagram of the plumbing:



was there anything else you were looking for?

 

How about a beer? That is great, thank you. Great thread.

 

Working on it. Hef should be ready in about a week

 

A bit of an update to the project. The decoction hef I did came out great and is being shipped out to competition. We'll see how much of a difference it makes in scores.

The system seems to have settled in to a pretty decent rhythm:


That's with a czech pils, blonde ale, and weizenbock in the fermenters at the moment. Ended up dumping both the kolsch and the german pils as there were some off flavors due to the power outage and they were brewed for competition.

There are a couple small revisions I'm looking at making in the near future, but the system as a whole works and it works pretty well.

 

Obviously the tanks are holding temperature well but the reservoir really seems to climb quiet a bit. Do you think you could use a larger reservoir for more thermal mass?

Three lagers at once could be pushing it.

 

Looks good. Maybe I missed it some pages back, but why are you using glycol and not water? Looks like you have the temp above freezing, and water is better at heat transfer than glycol.....

 

I think he started out with just water but was getting freezing at the coil.

 

ah ha....

 

It's a mixture of ~30% glycol and 70% water. You can keep the temperature around freezing, but at the evaporator coil, it will be significantly below freezing.

For instance, for a test run I ran water through the system as I didn't want to waste glycol if there were any leaks. I kept it at 40 degrees. A few hours later I checked back and there was at least an inch of solid ice on the coil. From what I've read, you need to have at least a 20 degree buffer before it freezes or that can happen.

Also, I change the temp of the glycol depending on what I'm fermenting. Right now I have a weizenbock, blonde, and pilsner going. The pils has to be ~50 degrees and the other two are in the upper 60s. If I were to drop the temp lower than I have it now, I'd get much bigger temp swings in the conicals fermenting the ales. This is because when the ball valve closes, you have a good deal of chilled glycol that sits in the lines, further cooling your beer. So, don't set it any lower than it really needs to be. Also, it saves some money in utility bills.

 

I could, but the curve would change if I changed the glycol temp. As it is, I just set it a degree or two higher than I want it to ferment at and set the hysteresis to 1 degree. Works pretty well.

I've slowly been putting together instructions to build one here:
http://plasticconical.com/

I still need to do the instructions for the controller, but a parts list and photos are there for everything else.

 

The AC unit is really overkill for 3 10 gallon conicals, but it's the smallest unit that's available. I know of at least one brewery using a 14k BTU AC unit to chill 3 10 barrel fermenters. The hysteresis is set to 8 deg F for the glycol to minimize the cycling of the A/C unit. As long as you don't get ice build up on the coil, it works great at least past the 86F ambient temps I've seen in the garage.

For ferm 2, I think that's just a result of the cold glycol sitting in the coil. I've had a couple different batches in there and as long as I have a lager and something in the upper 60s in the fermenters at the same time, that tends to happen. The good news though is that the beer still turns out great.

If I have all three of them with ales fermenting in the 60s and can turn the glycol temp up a bit, that effect doesn't happen nearly as much.

 

Well, it looks like it wasn't the glycol left in the lines causing the drop. The blonde was finished today. I replaced it with an oktoberfest lager and the same thing happened.

I think I found out what the problem is though. I think it's the 12V driver card having a bit of signal bleed from a neighboring channel. Seeing as there are 8 inputs and I'm only using 3 of them, I was able to move the one for ferm 2 a ways away from the others. It looks like ferm 2 has settled down now and should be good to go.

 

post a final chart once you see things settled down if you would? I'm a maths nerd and really dig seeing the proof of the elegance of your system.

Been following this thread since it started: Cheers on a great job!

 

Much better: