Cold crashing

[dpinette2]

My 7th batch is in the fermenter.

Purchased a ssbrewtech 7 gal bme with temp chronical. Love it. Drilled a hole in mini fridge/kegerator to put lines for temp control to go into a bucket inside fridge...

Thought i could get it to 38 to cold crash...I was mistaken! I can get to about 55.

I was planning on crashing, and transfer to keg sat. My question is, should I leave at 55....will that help some sediment drop out, or is that bad for the beer? I still have co2 hooked up to top as well, the plan was during crashing to have 1-2psi so no blowback.

I started temp at 65, then every two days went up a degree until i got to 70.5. It’s been in the fermenter 12ish days.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

 

[balrog]

The longer the colder you keep it, the more will drop out. It certainly isn't bad for the beer.

 

[RM-MN]

If you were able to crash the temperature down into the 30's you would be able to drop out the proteins that cause chill haze too. That can happen later too if you can get it cooler. If it is in your kegerator now and you can't get it colder than 55, how will that affect the beer when you serve it? That seems rather warm for anything other than a stout or barleywine.

 

[dpinette2]

the fridge holds a temp of 34, the problem is the water reservoir can’t maintain the temp. I have fermenter on top of mini fridge, drilled. hold and have the tubes for cooling system go into the fridge into a bucket of water with a pump....worked great for maintaining temps in 60s, but as soon as i went to go lower, the pump was constantly running and the water in the bucket doesn’t have enough time to chill back down as the return hose brings in warm water. It makes sense to me now that it would not work....but i thought i was basically creating a gycol chiller

 

[mongoose33]

the fridge holds a temp of 34, the problem is the water reservoir can’t maintain the temp. I have fermenter on top of mini fridge, drilled. hold and have the tubes for cooling system go into the fridge into a bucket of water with a pump....worked great for maintaining temps in 60s, but as soon as i went to go lower, the pump was constantly running and the water in the bucket doesn’t have enough time to chill back down as the return hose brings in warm water. It makes sense to me now that it would not work....but i thought i was basically creating a gycol chiller

Can you show a pic? Sounds like you're trying to use the fridge as a "glycol" reservoir and pumping the liquid...where? To tubing around the fermenter? To a stainless coil inside the fermenter?

Managing temps can be a many-headed hydra of competing effects. One is whether you are insulating the fermenter against heat gains from ambient temp. Another is the temp of the cooling liquid. A third is how well the chiller recovers from a demand for cooling fluid (hint: in a minifridge, not well). Fourth is how you've insulated the tubing between reservoir and fermenter.

If you can get the fermenter inside the minifridge, it will almost certainly be able to take the temps down to 34, or very close to it. It'll take 24 hours or so, but it'll get there. Because there is no need for insulation around the fermenter, no losses to ambient, no concern about tubing or insulating it or anything else, they will just work.

Here's a pic showing my minifridge ferm chamber.



**************

Managing heat gain and loss is an interesting exercise. I have a Spike 10-gallon conical fermenter, and a Penguin chiller which maintains chilled glycol solution at 28 degrees once the fermenter is cooled down. I cannot get that fermenter below about 38 degrees, despite having as good a chiller as you can get.

Why? Because there is just too much heat gain from ambient being drawn into the fermenter, from everything from the legs to the handles to the sampling port to the racking port to the yeast dump port.....I've even tried insulating those things, and it helps....a little. But I used mostly Reflectix to do that, which isn't all that great an insulator.

At some point I'll probably make a "Ferm Chamber" out of 2" foamboard insulation to surround that fermenter and to isolate it better from ambient. But there's only so much you can do, unless you can prevent heat gain from outside the fermenter.

The temp in my garage has fallen to 57 degrees, which might be low enough that I can get the beer lower than 38. We'll see.

 

[dpinette2]

 

[dpinette2]

i was trying to cheat the process i guess, the fridge is for a keg, and the water reservoir does a great job holding temps in 60, so i can’t complain

 

[SanPancho]

Not sure itll solve your problem completely , but if you can unscrew the frozen coils in the fridge on the bottom side, and get them into the water bucket youll get way more cooling. Not sure how low itll go, and you mayneed to mix in glycol so it doesn’t freeze, but will definitely work better than what you have now. Air is not a conductor, its an insulator. Doesnt tranfer heat very well at all, as you are seeing.

 

[mongoose33]

OK, I see. I presume there are SS coils inside the fermenter?

You're not going to be able to crash with that arrangement. You have the same issue I do--too many protuberances sticking out of the fermenter, all of which are sucking heat in. Further, there's just not enough cooling capacity the way you have it set up.

I spent a lot of time this summer trying to gin up a glycol chilling system using the upper freezer compartement of a refrigerator. I tried a lot of stuff to get it to crash down to 32, and I just couldn't get it to do that. I could get it down to 40/41 or so pretty readily, but it wasn't terribly fast.

Here are a couple posts detailing my work on this. I don't know if any of it will be of value to you, but it might give you some other ideas how to improve your setup:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...and-best-practices.645440/page-5#post-8269295

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...and-best-practices.645440/page-6#post-8280727

The ambient temp in my garage seems to be the limiting factor. Now that I'm at a time of year where the garage is below 60, the Penguin chiller is pretty fast. It's taken my current batch from 60 to 40 in 5 hours, that's pretty good. I'm going to see how close to 32 I can get, probably can approach it.

There are some other DIY approaches to glycol chilling, that will be much cheaper than a Penguin. I don't have any specific links to them on HBT, but they're out there. If you go to this IMAGES link on google, you'll see a lot of them, and simply visit the site for more info. Some are commercial, some DIY.

Good luck. It's kinda fun trying to figure this stuff out, isn't it?

 

[Bubman]

With that set up there is not enough surface area for the water to recover to a cold enough temp.

Picture a wort chiller, with a large length of small diameter tubing the water is effectively in contact with cold air longer.

Its all about the laws of thermodynamics.

You could try a larger bucket filled with ice water.

 

[shoengine]

With that set up there is not enough surface area for the water to recover to a cold enough temp.

Picture a wort chiller, with a large length of small diameter tubing the water is effectively in contact with cold air longer.

Its all about the laws of thermodynamics.

You could try a larger bucket filled with ice water.

That is what I was going to say. You have 7 gals of wort and you have maybe half a gallon to sink the heat into.

 

[NGD]

Couple of easy things that might help.

Defrost those coils on the side and install a fan inside there. M

A larger bucket would help..but if you could get those coils into the bucket...you’d be set.

 

[USMChueston0311]

I had the same problem and thread rcently. THERE IS NO WAY the fridge can keep up with the temp exchange between chilling the beer.

Go spend 100-200$ buy an AC unit and cooler, wire the thermostat 2 wires together, and put the condenser into a water/glycol bath, annnddd BOOM. Problem solved. If not, just carb, keg, gelatin finn and crash in keg for 2-4 days before serving and first couple pints will remove all the dropped out sediments etc.

The glycol chiller is SUPER obnoxiously easy to do. It just sounds hard and complicated and I was always like naw it’s too hard to
Even think about, until I actually looked at what it is, and I had one built in a matter of hours.