What would you suggest?

[sportscrazed2]

electric turkey fryer? can i use that for the boil? if i could that would save me a trip halfway across the house to store the fermenter in my closet

 

[wacko]

I've actually wondered about that myself. They should because I think they heat fry oil to 350ish for frying. So getting water to 212 should be easy.

 

[sportscrazed2]

and to cool off the wort can you pour the wort into cold water to rapidly bring down temperature? do you have to put the pot into an ice bucket or can you skip that and pour it into cold water already in the fermenter? seems like you could kill 2 birds with one stone there

 

[wacko]

Lots of people use a wort chiller which can be expensive and some people just let it sit overnight.

 

[sportscrazed2]

Lots of people use a wort chiller which can be expensive and some people just let it sit overnight.

wort chiller is out would rather just buy a bag of ice for $2 and fill sink with tap water and some salt. isn't letting it sit overnight dangerous?

 

[daenja]

This might be out of your price range, but here's a turkey fryer I've got my eye on...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002VW9L64/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

170,000 BTUs and a 10.5 gallon pot for $90

 

[wacko]

wort chiller is out would rather just buy a bag of ice for $2 and fill sink with tap water and some salt. isn't letting it sit overnight dangerous?

Assuming the pot is removable from the electric turkey fryer, yeah.

As far as sitting over night it should be ok if you cover it. I'll see if I can dig up some discussions on it

 

[sportscrazed2]

This might be out of your price range, but here's a turkey fryer I've got my eye on...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002VW9L64/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

170,000 BTUs and a 10.5 gallon pot for $90

any turkey fryer that isn't indoors is out of the question as well. tis almost october and it's starting too cool down

 

[sportscrazed2]

I've been doing some research and it seems secondary fermentation is just to clarify the beer. the first beer i'm going to do is going to be a stout so that's not really a big issue for me. also the only other advantage of secondary i seem to see is that it removes the beer from the sediment on the bottom. but wouldn't transferring to a bottling bucket before bottling serve the exact same purpose? just make sure not to let siphon touch the sediment right? also is it possible to siphon through a strainer of some sort to catch the sediment?

 

[daenja]

The initial reason to secondary your beer was to get the beer off the yeast cake as it was thought to give off flavors if it was left too long. That is slowly being disproved. One member on this forum was away on business and left his beer for 84 days in the primary with no ill effects. He however didn't have a control beer that he racked off the yeast in the 'normal' amount of time, so that example isn't exactly scientific.

A bottling bucket is good to use as you boil and cool your priming sugar, put it into the bucket first and rack the beer on top of it. That will give you a better mix and more consistent carbonation from bottle to bottle.