Apartment-Size Brewing Refrigerator

[Lisamandy]

@Saccharomyces

Call me old school, but I have always used an apartment-size refrigerator as a multi-purpose brewing refrigerator.  An apartment size (10 to 14cu. ft) refrigerator is big here enough to hold at least two soda kegs with picnic taps while providing me with space to store blank media, my culture collectidon, and sterile starter media in refrigerator section.  I store hops and dried yeast in the freezer section.  My old brewing refrigerator was a 10cu. ft. Samsung non-frost free unit.  That went with my old brewery, so I am now looking at a Whirlpool 11.6 cu. ft. Top Freezer Refrigerator.

In a day and age where people are using freezers as keezers and have dedicated chillers for fermentation,  I wonder what people are using to store their hops and yeast.  What happened to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) approach to amateur brewing?  Did it go away after non-engineers dominated what used to be primarily an engineer’s (or at least STEM graduates) hobby in the United States?  If anyone doubts that this hobby used to be dominated by engineering types, all he/she only needs to look at the pioneers.  Charlie P. was a nuclear engineer.  John Palmer was a metallurgical engineer.  I was and still am a computer scientist and engineer (BS and MS degrees in computer science and engineering).  Early brewing was like a mad monks squad of offbeat engineering types (maybe, offbeat was a little too kind).  It was a geek hobby that few people understood. My only guess as to why engineering types dominated amateur brewing in the early days is that it required engineer’s ability to build things that people want using things one can get. Sure, there were non-engineers, but they were creative enough to build their own stuff.

I guess I don’t get the point of your tirade. Do you mean to argue that we don’t innovate enough? Yes, there are now numerous Grainfathers and Picobrews available. However, creative people are still present. I turned a secondhand window air conditioner that I had purchased for $5 from a garage sale into a glycol chiller. Should I join your club?

[redrocker652002]

I have an old dorm fridge that was converted into a kegerator, I bought it already done for 50 bucks I think.  And it included the tap, and homemade tower made from steel pipe.  It also included the regulator.  My fermenting space is a hall closet that I am going to try a temp controller for the first time.  My neighbor just put out a standing fridge with a freezer above it for free.  She says it works, but we have had some pretty thick fog for the last few days, so I am doubting it works now.  Wife would not have been happy to see it over here, so I decided to let it pass this time and deal more with the process of me making the beer.  I love the DIY stuff, and I had some PVC left over and made a bucket and keg washer that I have been using.  Need to tweak it a bit.  Found a really cool Youtube Vid of a guy who made a bottle washer out of pvc and fountain pens.  Might give that a whirl as I have a bunch of pvc laying around.  I do say the new stuff is pretty cool, the Anvil Foundry is a wish list for me, but the fun in it all is sitting around, having a few home brews and actually making beer.  Not filling up a bucket and turning on a switch.  At least for now, that is how I think.  RR