Hot weather! Is my brewing season over?

I checked on my Apple "Graff" today (@ 7 days using Nottingham) - and my carboy temperature strip was at 79F!

I have my carboys indoors, in a closet. I have central a/c which keeps the house around 77F, which is usually lower (~74F) in the closet.

I'm aware that the temps inside the fermenter are higher than the ambient, not to mention that I'm already on the *warm* side to begin with.

So ... I freaked out (like I do with all my home brew ) and frantically filled the bathtub with cold water, sat my carboy inside, and wrapped it in soaked T-shirts. Btw the soaked t-shirts don't look near as good on carboys as they do on a set of jugs

Do I have any low-tech options of temp control, short of ice-bathing and babying my carboy constantly?

Thanks.

 

Close all of the AC vents except for the one in the room where the bucket is, and crank that AC up. The rest of your house will get warm, but the beer will be CHILLIN.

 

Well, my low-tech option is a 60 qt Igloo "Ice-Cube" cooler, filled with water up to the level of the beer in the carboy. I take water bottles, dump a little out, and stick them in the freezer. Then every day I check the pool thermometer that I put in the cooler water and dump a couple of the frozen water bottles in there if I need to bring the temps down. I'm able to keep the temp down in the low 60's pretty easily here in Houston, and that's with the cooler sitting outside in a non-temperature controlled shed.

 

Your best bet for a relatively cheap and easy option is to buy a used fridge or freezer on CL and connect it to a Ranco or Love controller. The next cheaper but more labor intensive option is to build a "Son of Fermentation Chiller". The next is the swamp cooler method, where you set your vessel in a water bath with a fan blowing across.

 

In the dead heat of summer the closets even get hot for me and I keep the AC at 75 most of the time.
Just use a big rubbermaid container with water or a big party bucket with water and then freeze some 2L bottles.
I put one 2L in in the morning, one in the after noon and one at night. Keeps the temp in the giant party bucket right around 65-68. This will be much better than even the 74 degrees of the closet. The fermenting wort will be slightly warmer than the ambient temp anyways, so your beer would have been fermenting at like 75 degrees.

 

The tub full of water and ice bottles works great. I kept a beer in the 60's when it was over 100 degrees out and we had no AC in the apartment. Now that I have a house, I've finally decided to upgrade. Picked up one of those reach-in coolers that they used at grocery stores. A chest freezer and temperature controller works as well too if you don't want to go that far. As said, you can find them fairly cheap on craigslist.

 

I like using my chest freezer with Johnson controller, because you can just set it and forget it. $50 for a chest freezer on CraigsList and $65 for the controller.

 

I decided not to *****foot around anymore. I got a temperature controller for the spare fridge. I figured that would be the last time I screw up my ferm temps. The next brew was my best.

 

I've done the ice bottles and other routes.

I am going to attempt a pressurized ferment at room temp here for my next brew, which is quickly climbing into the 70's. Since you're supposed to get less esters under pressure, it might work. Lord only knows how much I'd love to be able to drop the buckets of water, t-shirts, fans, etc.



Hmmmm....eyeing yet another freezer for fermentation My small chest freezer plus eBay temp controller set me back $80 total, but I don't know if I have any more space to do one for fermentation

 

Thanks for the tips

Hogging the a/c is a possibility, but not an option at this time . It would make a certain somebody even more crazy when it get's hot like this.

We just sold our full-time garage freezer, so Ice will be at a premium - due to lack of indoor, excuse-for-a-freezer space.

I'm going spend my day off looking at the options you guys listed.
I really appreciate it.

I love these boards.

 

I like this idea. Lowering/raising pressure in a vacuum essentially changes the ambient temperature right? Is this what you're getting at?

 

im hoping my brew isent ruined i brewed a amber ale Tuesday and i keep mine in a closet aswell guess i better start freezin some bottles i checked mine today after work and the temp strip read 85. I had put my carboy in my brew pot and filled it with a gallon of ice water. I had planned on making a kegerater out of a refrigerator guess ill have to make a lagerater as well just to ferment my ales this hobby is going to take up alot of space and money but its worth it

 

My first 4-5 batches had no temp control and fermented anywhere from 68-77 degrees. None of them were "bad", most of them were really good in fact. Its just that the beers I fermented colder were just "better".

 

NO. Do not do this. You will create to much backpressure on your airhandler. Bad juju. you can close a few vents but most need to stay open. To little intake flowrate can cause the motor to work to hard as well as to little output flowrate can do the same.

 

I don't know if that's the mechanism for what happens.

People found that you can ferment lagers at warmer temperatures without creating esters if you ferment at pressure. The Wiki on lagers has some somewhat hard to read charts and basic info on this.

I figure that if it works for lagers, it is likely to work for ales also.

 

Is this also why the big breweries don't have to ferment ales at such cold (60's) temps as well?

 

That's pretty much what I do here in Hawai`i. Big "muck" bucket w/fermenter and 1/2 g block of ice. Right now at noon, it's 84 outside and 65 in the muck bucket. I even quit using the wet towel as temps were getting down to 60 at night. Right now just a dry towel and the block of ice work great. One in the morning and one in the late aftrnoon.

Same old picture!

 

I'm in SoCal also, so I'm having to deal with the heat to. I just finished my "son of a fermenter" build and have it set at 55 for my yeast starter. It's had no problem yesterday or today holding the temp. I have it in the garage so its pretty toasty out there right now. So far I am impressed with the way it works. If you do look into this, just be aware that you need some freezer space to freeze several 1 gallon jugs of water. I've got 2 in the fermenter and 2 in the freezer. I've been rotating them every 2 days.

 

I've decided on a few routes short-term and long term.

Right now:

I have my carboy wrapped in 2 soaked white t-shirts, with a fan blowing on them. Amazingly it brought my temps down to 72F. It was almost 80F this morning.​

Tonight:

I'm picking up a 10gal igloo and making a small, pond pump water chiller. (jcarson83). This will double over as a mash tun once I have a better solution.​

Later (the better solution):

I found a 14cu/ft chest freezer that is semi-functional (doesn't freeze), for a good price. This will be my final solution. ​

 

Haa ha ha , cooling the beer,but not the house with people in it. sounds expensive and unpleasantly warm unless your name would have to be BEER! Sounds like mine is going down in the basement this summer.

 

Get a chest freezer with a temp controller and never worry about it again. All those other methods will work but are not consistent and you have to keep maintaining the frozen bottles or chunks of ice, etc. If you want to make beer consistent you need to be able to control fermentation temperatures from batch to batch.

 

^The only part that troubles me is the operating cost vs usage.

I have a freezer inside, stuffed with frozen meat to the point where I have a hard time closing the door.

Soon, I'll have a freezer with tons of space, that doesn't freeze.

My HB dedication is lacking and I am unworthy.

 

Another option is brew beers like Belgians. We dont have AC in our house and it gets really warm at times in my fermenting room. Prefect for Belgian Yeast

 

Head to the local Home Depot or Lowes and pick up a few of the big buckets. Fill them with water and put them in there.

Or just unplug it when it's not in use.

 

To control the fermenting temp all you shoud need would be the buckets, muck buckets, and ice, and a wet towel. I have an indoor/outdoor thermometer to keep track of the temp in the bucket. If you are in the shade outside it' not a big thing to maintain 68*

 

I managed to figure out how to keep my temps below 70F - but it was too little too late.

I racked my carboy (5gal apple Graff @ 14days - Nottingham) and now I understand what it means when ppl say it tastes "hot".

It has a after-note tinge that reminds me of methylated etOH (I'm guessing it's fusel/ester oils).

Should I give it another week to settle before the bottle?

 

+1 That's my plan for the summer. Perfect time for the Saison brewing. After I do my pale ale and my special brew for the wife, it's gonna be all farmhouse ales baby.

 

With a temperature controlled freezer, the operating cost and usage are correlated. My freezers that are filled with beer only run for a very small percentage of the time. It is not hard for a freezer to keep itself at 67%, especially if you have it indoors.

 

just need to cool it down somehow, running the AC full blast is kinda expensive, here is a cheap method

 

I'm in Florida, and it gets nice and hot here in the summer, but I still ferment in my garage. Here is what I put together. It works wonderfully!

 

I saw no difference in my electric bill with the freezer. It turns on about once a day for 10 minutes or so, maybe more if you are opening it up all the time. Some one did a calculation on here a while back but realistically you are talking about such a small amount that you would never notice it. Even running all the time like a normal freezer they are cheap to operate. In the winter mine never runs, it just stays at like 65.

It all comes down to how good you want your beer to be. I don't care how diligent you are with bottles of water and towels and what not, you just can't control as well with that method as you can with a chest freezer or other ferm chamber. Maybe good is not the word but consistent. You have to remember as well that fermenting beer is at least 5 degrees hotter than the ambient temp, sometimes more. I set my chest freezer for 62 with my IPA and the beer temp in the first couple of days is 68. I then let the freezer get to 65 as fermentation slows down. Just that change from leaving the chamber at 65 with the beer at 70-71 resulted in a much cleaner taste. Controlling temps can have a drastic change on the finished product and is well worth the investment.

 

^nice. I will definitely invest in a chest freezer in the future. What cu/ft is yours btw?

 

8.8 kenmore. Fits 2 glass carboys comfortably.

 

you are near the ocean and have pretty even temps and not outrageously high either. My freezer is on the porch where the summer temps get over 100 a lot so it runs way more than 10 minutes a day.

That being said, it only draws 125-150 watts so even if it ran 50% of the time, that is not all that much compared to a lot of other things.

 

I have no AC however and a reef tank with a chiller in the same room. The room itself gets well into the 90's during the summer with the chiller running. The chest freezers are well insulated though and even with the room temp being so high the freezer does not need to run much if you avoid opening it to stare longingly at your fermenting beer lol.

 

Thanks fellas!