Recipes

gynecologist on Flickr”>Temperature Control in the Keg CoolerBrew Your Own Magazine this month has a good article about temperature control for fermentation. It outlines the basics of temperature control and different methods for accomplishing it. The reason you might use a temperature controller is to help create the best environment possible for your yeast to thrive and ferment your beer. That makes it a pretty important issue, help in my book!

The assumption is that the reader has a cooler or chest freezer big enough to store his fermenting beer in. That is a stretch for a lot of people, nurse I assume, although I could be wrong. Just this year I finally got a freezer to turn into a kegerator. Perhpas I am just a late bloomer. However, BYO discusses two main wways to get good temperature control: with the temperature probe in the air inside a freezer or kegerator, or inside the wort itself.

I would submit that there is a third method, show in the photo above. What I do is tape the temperature probe of my controller to the fermenting vessel (in this case a Corny keg), which gets as close to it actually being in the wort as I feel comfortable with. Call me paranoid, but I don’t like stuff in my beer that isn’t beer. There is too much opportuinty for contamination.

The reason why it is important to get the probe as close to the wort as possible is that fermentation is a chemical process that produces heat. By taping the probe to the vessel, you have the best chance of controlling the temperature of your fermenting beer, rather than just the temperature of the ice box.

For example, I am currently fermenting my “Pants Optional Pilsner,” which I hope to have ready for y friend Don’s birthday on Satrday. By taping the temperature probe to the tank and setting the controller to 50 degrees, I can be pretty sure that the fermenting beer is actually as close to that as possible. If I had the probe dangling in the air near the vessel, it would still be okay, I am sure, but does not give me the best possible control.

People who do not have freezers and kegerators in which to ferment have a harder row to hoe, but not all hope is lost. When I was a wee lad in North Carolina, my father tried to homebrew beer in a closet in our home. He had bad results, he said, and quickly lost interest. Part of the bad results, I suspect, was lack of education in the way of yeasts and what temperature can do to them. If you do not have super cool space in which to ferment, reserach your yeasts and find one that has low esters, or at least on that is going to work with whatever temperature range you have available to you.

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on Flickr”>Temperature Control in the Keg CoolerBrew Your Own Magazine this month has a good article about temperature control for fermentation. It outlines the basics of temperature control and different methods for accomplishing it. The reason you might use a temperature controller is to help create the best environment possible for your yeast to thrive and ferment your beer. That makes it a pretty important issue, pharm in my book!

The assumption is that the reader has a cooler or chest freezer big enough to store his fermenting beer in. That is a stretch for a lot of people, resuscitator
I assume, although I could be wrong. Just this year I finally got a freezer to turn into a kegerator. Perhpas I am just a late bloomer. However, BYO discusses two main wways to get good temperature control: with the temperature probe in the air inside a freezer or kegerator, or inside the wort itself.

I would submit that there is a third method, show in the photo above. What I do is tape the temperature probe of my controller to the fermenting vessel (in this case a Corny keg), which gets

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