Fermentation Cooling

[zippythepin]

a great and cheap way to cool your beer is to place your carboy in a container preferably an insulated one. you want less than a 1/8" of room in the container fill it up with water it should only take a few cups. this alone can drop your beer 5 f but if you can tuck some ice packs pack in there also you can get it down 7-10 easy.

[Afterlab]

What I've done is use a large 18 gallon rubbermaid bin. Grab aluminum foil or a roll of thermal insulated tape ($15-$20 at Home Depot or wherever) and fully wrap/tape the outside of the rubbermaid bin. Take the lid and cut a circular hole in the center of it so you can see the top of the carboy sticking out with the bin lid on. Place the carboy in the rubbermaid bin, fill with water and rotate with frozen water battles. This has held the temp within 1-2 degrees.

[spiderwrangler]

If you are trying to score a fridge on the cheap, keep in mind that older models that people are getting rid off are probably way less energy efficient than a newer model. Sure if you save up to buy a newer fridge it costs more up front, but if you are paying a couple bucks a month less in electricity, it could add up pretty quickly...

[ajdelange]

Okay, so assuming that you don't need to heat your fermenter just accurately control the amount of cooling that is being applied, how do rig up a temperature thermostat to a fridge? I have a old dorm fridge that is real nice I could get something rigged up with some help.

Some of the inexpensive controllers (that 99% of brewers use to control a refrigerator) come wired and some don't. The wiring is trivial. Just get a 3 wire extension cord, carefully (without cutting the interior wires or their individual insulation) cut away the jacked fairly near the socket end. Loop these and push them into the controller body. Cut the black (hot) wire loop and connect the ends to the terminals on the controller. Close it up and you are finished. Plug the refrigerator into the socket and the plug into the wall. Set the 'fridge for maximum cold (so its thermostat is always calling for cold). The mistake many make at this point is suspending the probe in the refrigerator's air. This results in the compressor cycling more often than it needs to. The correct thing to do here is suspend the probe in a small bottle of water. The temperature it measures is then closer to the temprature of the beer in the fermenter. The compressor will run for a longer time when it does run but it will not cycle nearly so often as it would if air temperature were being sensed.