Well summer is approaching, and I find myself almost out if beer. I started being last fall so I've not had a summer brew yet. How do I keep the fermentation at the right temperature during the warm months. The guys at the homebrew shop suggested ice blocks and towels, but that sounds like a pain. What's the easiest cheapest way to hold the right temp for fermentation?
"Easy" and "cheap" very seldom coincide.
I'll second (or third, or whatever) the fridge-and-temperature-controller notion. It is the single most important improvement you'll make in your brewing. Not going all-grain or whatever - yeast management and temperature control.
The first thing a brewer must master is sanitation. The second is yeast/ferment management. Period.
My dirty little pro-brewer secret: I continued to brew at home when I started in brewing professionally at a packaging brewery, because I wanted more variety than I could get from our company labels. But brewing all-grain takes all damn day whether you're doing 5 gallons or 30bbl, and I for durn tootin' wasn't going to blow a Saturday doing what I did Monday through Friday! So I brewed with extracts and specialty grains. I also started entering competitions and winning awards. Why? Because I'd learned yeast management and temperature control.
I lived in a second-floor apartment with no access to any sort of basement. It was summer in eastern Pennsylvania, during which temperatures regularly top 100F. It's also usually 80-90% humidity, because we were in a river valley. So swamp cooling was out. Plus I was at the brewery 10 hours a day, so there was no swapping out frozen bottles.
Twice a year in that town, the trash blokes had a "you put it out, we'll take it away". The only thing they drew the line at was human corpses and cars. We poor folks would go a-scavenging the evening before and before dawn on the day.
I was actually looking for living-room furniture when I saw a man hauling a fridge to his curb. I asked him if it worked. He said, "Sure. Just don't need it anymore." So I helped him put it into the bed of my pickup. I loved that early-1970s avocado monstrosity.
(These were the days before Craigslist. Nowadays you can find fridges for free, usually with the proviso that you haul it away.)
Now I had a way to "jacket" my fermenter. So we hauled it up my stairs and put it in the spare bedroom. I immediately started using it. But it didn't work according to plan! The temperature differential swing was massive. The first beer stalled, because it got too cold. The second beer went wild, because it didn't get cold enough. So I made a temperature controller out of a Johnson Controls digital controller.
(These were the days before you could
buy them ready-made from homebrew shops.)
The first beer fermented in that fridge won a competition. Not best in show, but its BJCP category. And it used
no grains at all. It was 100% extract. Not only that,
it was a hopped extract kit! (Okay, it was a Euro-pils kit I dry-hopped with a random handful of Mt Hood pellets. And I used some 1056 from work. But it was still an all-extract, no-boil kit that won Blonde Ale in that competition!)
TL;DR: Get a used fridge, install it with
one of these, and figure out how to use it. It's the single
most important investment in brewing equipment you can make.
Cheers,
Bob