This seems to a very cool little device for 5 gallon batches. I wish they made one for my 1bbl system.
They are doing a demo at NHC.
The rod that goes in the beer is made of anodized Aluminum. Isn’t aluminum bad post kettle? Maybe the anodizing makes it ok?
Im afraid to ask how much
$300
What is up with people on Kickstarter selling t-shirts for $50?
Seriously. The last thing I need is another t-shirt. Much less one that costs $50.
Remember, they arnt selling tshirts for 50 bucks. they are asking for a 50$ donation from you and in return they will give you cool swag in tshirt form.
Well they are actually selling tshirts for $50… The vast majority of kickstarter campaigns that price their rewards too high like this fail. Usually if they have a tshirt in the $15-$20 range they would be much better off… Though usually what people really want is the product at a reasonable rate… I have bought maybe 15 things off of Kickstarter… It’s cool, but there is also a significant delay in receiving your items if the item is the one they are hoping to produce.
Basically what I mean is the best campaigns sell stuff to raise money and the ones that try and raise money via ‘donations’ tend to be the ones that fail.
$300 is still too much for me to buy this thing. I could see possibly doing it for like $150.
With that said I’m glad they didn’t fail this time. I spoke with them quite a bit at the NHC last year, but then their campaign failed last year… This time around they did make some improvements to the actual product and it’s price I think.
I gotta question how well it works. It says that it can take your wort “down to 35F below ambient IN A MATTER OF DAYS and hold it there”. We all know the first 2 or 3 days of fermentation are really critical, in terms of temp control. Seems that there would have to be a lot of trial and error, to be anywhere near as accurate as just setting a controller on a fridge and letting it go.
I think that is intended for cold crashing your beer. You should be chilling the wort down to pitching temp before going into your fermenter.
No, chilling to pitching temps was a given to me. It just seems that its premise is cooling ‘X’ degrees below ambient, as opposed to setting and holding a temp. Maybe not. Think I’ll pass anyway.
it operates by holding a temp you set… but if you are trying to actually cool it to X temp it will take days to drop 35 degrees is what it’s saying. So if you chill your wort down to 50F and pitch you would then set the thing to 50F and it would maintain that. At the end of that you could drop the temp to cold crash or lager it (within their 35F range…)
Gotcha, cool.
EDIT - My bad, never hurts to click on the details link. 
Wouldn’t work for me. I depend on my ability to drop the wort in the fermenter from ~85 to pitching temps in a few hours. Just not possible to reach 64 much less 50 with 70 degree tap water.
Yeah I have no clue how long that would take for this thing to drop it down from like 75 (I’m assuming you don’t get the wort to the water temp) to 60 or 50… Both are less than their 35 drop that they say will take days… but not but a whole lot… though I imagine those temps as you get closer to their limit would take much longer.
That’s a question I have also.
Don’t worry after you use it for awhile you’ll forget why you were concerned about it in the first place (I know bad joke…)
Anodizing is used to create a corrosion resistant layer. Pretty interesting process, it changes the surface of the base metal to create a much less porous and in turn corrosion resistant surface by increasing the natural oxide layer of the base metal. We utilize the process quite a bit in the aerospace industry. A lot of parts used for naval craft require this process. I know it is pretty resistant to chipping and salt corrosion. Would I feel comfortable consuming something that has basically been steeping in it? I dunno. Just my 2 cents. (not a big fan of associating consumables with aluminum when heat and time are a big contributing factor)