Brew fridge!

Once I’ve finally finished emptying the shed and sorting out electricity at the very least, it’s going to become my own little brewing workshop. The first, most useful thing to get housed there (except for me) will be a brew fridge. Most peoples’ first impression of what a brew fridge is used for is probably  keeping brown bottles of loveliness cool for summer swigging. However, while this is a great use for a fridge, it’s not what it’s for.

Fridge

A fridge. Pretty uneventful like this.

A brew fridge might be more accurately described as a temperature controlled, insulated fermentation chamber. Summer brewing isn’t too bad, the temperature indoors is usually around 20-22 ºC which is fine for most ale yeasts. However, in the winter it an be difficult to keep the temperature constant around that range wihout racking up a monster central heating bill. Conversely in the summer when it’s hot (as it is at the moment), it’s very difficult to get the beer down to temperatures of say 17 ºC, which some yeasts prefer. You can forget all about lagering too.

A brew fridge solves both the ‘too hot’ and ‘too cold’ problems in one fell swoop, like some kind of magical Goldilocks solution – just right! It consists of three main parts:

  1. A fridge
  2. A heater
  3. A temperature controller

As always, I’m looking to do this on the cheap. The fridge is going to be either a donation or something cheap from the local classifieds I hope. The heater will probably be a tube-type one, readily available on ebay for about £15. The controller I’ve decided on will probably be the STC-1000.

stc-1000 temperature controller

The STC-1000, homebrewers’ friend the world over.

There are some great posts on brewing forums on how to put them together, and I’ll probably end up with a project box from screwfix to house it all. At the most basic level the fridge is used for cooling, the heater for heating, and the controller tells each of those when to come on. The controller is set up for a particular temperature, and a tolerance range. A probe that comes with it tells it what temperature it is at any one time.

A practical example: The fridge is connected to the cooling side of the controller, the heater to the heating. I pitch yeast in a wheat beer that I want to ferment @ 17 ºC, so I set the controller to 17º with a tolerance of 0.5º. If the temperature rises about 17.5º the fridge turns on (set to medium cooling, don’t want to try to cool it too quickly), and if it drops to 16.5º the heater turns on.

It sounds like it would be constantly yo-yo-ing, flicking between heating and cooling, but because the fridge is well insulated by nature, and because the thermal mass of 23 litres of beer takes a long time to change, any active switching would be minimised once it reaches the target temperature.

I mention a wheat beer because that’s my next planned brew. Apparently wheat malt is a nightmare to mash with and can lead to stuck mashes, so I’m interested to see what happens. Cooling it at that temperature should give me nice ‘banana’ esters and a fruity flavour. Above 20º results in clove-like phenols apparently, which can be desirable, but not for me, not this time.

Build pictures once it happens.

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