Beer Forum

Found this a few weeks back, ordered one last week. Looking forward to trying it out.

https://www.thefastrack.ca/main/fastferment

Looks pretty sweet, anyway to put it in a fridge for temp control?

I got one of these back when they first came out and have done a few batches in it. I don't think I've found the best way to use it yet, but I have found a flavor difference using that vs using my carboys (and not necessarily positive).

One thing that I noticed is that if you use the ball on the bottom while fermenting, you can end up with the yeast down in the ball fermenting and not sitting at the same temperature as the rest of the conical since the thermowell is up in the main body of the thing. I was using a heating pad strapped to the side with a controller, which isn't the best way to control the temp. I need to rebuild my ferment chamber to put the whole thing into it so that the temp is more stable across the whole fermentor.

Using the conical is certainly more convenient than using carboys. Dropping trub, harvesting yeast, all that stuff seems to work well enough.

Overall, my opinion is still out. I think I need to get the chamber finished and do some more batches to figure out what exactly the best method is to use it. There is a pretty long thread on it on homebrewtalk.com.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/fastfer ... er-478906/

[Edit - Mod edited so this post shows up]

I bought one about 3 months ago and loved it. I brewed a 10 gal batch and had to use a carboy for the other 5 gal and I hated having to go back to it. So I bought another fast ferment. These things are great. The worst part about them is the lid seal. But I just bought some silicone sheets off of amazon and made my own seals and it works great now. Most of us don't have money for a nice SS conical fermenter, this is the next best option. I use these in a vertical chest freezer with temp controller and they are awesome. I will never go back to carboys again.

So as an update about the fastferment:

Originally, I used a heating pad strapped to the side of it to control the temperature, then wrapped a sleeping bag around the whole thing. I found that this was giving me really bad results, and I think this was due to the big differences in temperature that you can get between where the pad is, the ball at the bottom, and where the thermal probe is reading. Several beers came out very fruity, and you could see the heating pad area bubbling more than the rest.

After making a chamber, that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore. I used some 2" foam board to just make a box on the front of a small college fridge. I have a fan circulating the air around in there and a heating pad for making heat if needed. The joints are all duct taped over to keep leaks out, and the front door has a ring of fiberglass insulation around the edge to make a 'gasket'. The front is then held on by rubber bands that go between some screws that go into the foam board on the door side and the box side. So far, the new results are much better.

So I guess the moral to my story is to keep the heating for the thing as indirect as possible. Heating/cooling the air in the chamber seems fine.