Poor Mans Fermentation Chamber

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving we brewed a douple IPA kit called Surly Furious.  I plopped the fermentation bucket down in my dingy basement and left it alone until yesterday.  However, while sitting at work yesterday I realized that there was no way the temperature in the basement was warm enough for the yeast to be doing it's thing so I decided that as soon as I got home I'd put toegther some sort of fermentation chamber on the fly just to get through this beer.

A couple years ago I backed a kickstarter for the BrewBit (note the website is outdated and I don't think it is really for sale anymore).  It's a cool digital temperature controller with a touch screen and a web interface.  However, I'd never gotten around to actually using it for anything other than a over-qualified beer fridge thermometer.  First world problem of the utmost degree.

The BrewBit set at 71

Having the brewbit on hand made the process vastly easier and really makes a lie of the claim that this is a poor mans fermentation chamber.  That gadget was expensive.  But the rest of this "build", and I use that term very loosely, is as poor as it gets.

I didn't have any scrap wood in the garage at all but I did have an old crate-ish box I'd made for my daughters science experiment as an incubation chamber before so I used that as the basis.  I then took an old electric space heater I keep in my bathroom (which gets inordinately cold in the winter) and sacrificed my tush comfort to provide a heat source for the beer.  Finally I grabbed an old painting drop cloth and draped it over the box to hold in the heat.

The Whole Enchilada

That's it.  The whole thing.  You can see the heater on the right and the drop cloth clumped on the top.  Looks pretty damn shabby.


Here is a close up of the heater "vented" into the box.  The box is kind of weird, it's made out of peg board because it needed to allow airflow when it was an incubation chamber.  The big hole wasn't there when I started but I was worried the heater would over-heat the pegboard so I cut out the hole with a utility knife to let the hot air enter.

Inside the box, on the far side is the bucket.  It's about a foot from the heater.  The temperature probe is on the far side of the bucket so that the air in the box really needs to get into the 70s before the BrewBit can turn off the heater.

The basement temperature was down near 60 when I first set this all up and the BrewBit turned on the heater about a minute after I set it up but then, as the temp got close to 68 in the box the surge protector popped and the temperature fell.  I didn't realize it had popped until about 20 minutes later when I went to check on things.  To alleviate that problem I ended up running an extension cord from the brew bit upstairs and taking the surge protector out of the loop.  I didn't want to plug the brew bit in directly to the wall in the basement because if it popped the circuit breaker I didn't want our deep freezer to shut off.

I remembered this morning that from the BrewBit website I could view the temperature activity.  Here is a sample of the variation where the BrewBit is aiming to keep the temperature in the box at 71F.

As you can see it's doing a pretty good job.  It was on a one minute cycle but this morning I changed it to a 3 minute cycle (which was the default setting before I changed it).  I'll monitor it during the day but I think I'll be happy.

Bubbles

In the photo above you can see the bucket in the chamber.  The black thing is the power cord for the BrewBit.  You can't even see the temperature controller wire at all.  But if you look closely you can see bubbles in the vapor lock!

Here is a very crappy and short video of the fermentation in process.

Once this beer is in the keg I'll build a real fermentation chamber that is both more efficient and which will both heat and cool depending on the current conditions.

Temp Controller - Getting Gadgety

In our brewing sessions we mostly brew at my house (Bill's) but we also brew at Mike's.  We've consistently had a better end result in beer when we ferment at Mike's house.  Curious about this I've narrowed it down to the fact that Mike is able to keep the beer in a room with a consistent temperature the entire time while I keep having to shift the beer around to try to find a good consistent temperature due to a variety of external factors not the least of which is my wife and the thermostat.

To cure this problem I've decided to buy a temperature controller and attempt to setup a fermentation chamber so that I can keep the bucket at the right temp for the beer being brewed.  I settled on the BrewBit which is probably more than I need but I'm a bit of a gadget freak so I figured, "What the hell?"

I have a small dorm style fridge that I think will be big enough to hold the bucket (I hope) and, if so, I'll be using that as my chamber.  If not I'll have to find something better (suggestions are more than welcome).  As the controller can manage two heat sources and our weather is inconsistent to say the least I figured I'd put the fridge on it and then drop a small hair dryer in the fridge and use that as the other heat source.  The brewbit could then cool or warm the interior of the fridge based on the current situation.

The last two beers we brewed at my house just haven't tasted right to me and I've been reluctant to brew again until I could improve the environmental controls a bit.  I hope I don't have to wait too long to get the brew bit becuase I'd like to get back at it. I figure I'll do a couple more extract kits and if they work out better than it will be time to try some all grain recipes.  If that works then I have my eyes on building a keezer.

Here is the inspiration for the fermentation chamber in the video: http://brokenglassbrewing.blogspot.com/2011/04/fermentation-chamber-build.html