I’ve been called a newbie for still bottling my beer. This has kept me awake at night. Now chance has it that I might be able to free myself from this sad epitheton ornans as there is an opportunity for me to buy second-hand kegs. Silly question: is there a practical way to ferment and store beer in kegs with only one temperature-controlled chest, or is it imperative to have 2 chests? Right now I have no room for an extra one.
The only possibility I see now is 1. to ferment a beer 2. transfer the beer to another keg and force carbonate 3. empty the keg, preferably through the mouth 4. go back to 1.
So completely serial procedure. Not sure whether that would be an improvement. Am I missing something?
You could try the swamp cooler method for your fermentations although it is a bit of a PITA. Then you could just use your chest freezer for serving from your keg(s).
Or brew lagers and ferment them at 48-50F in your chest freezer and also serve your beer at that temp from the same freezer.
I recently bought a 2nd one. When I had one it still worked well - the only downside was there was a gap in serving since fermentation or cold crashing temperatures don’t line up well with serving temperatures. One way around this was mixing it up with stuff like saisons that could stand fermenting at my higher room temperature.
Maybe an ordinary bitter served at 59f on tap while fermenting an ale… or any beer being served in the high 40s/ low 50s while fermenting a lager.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen mods where someone has partitioned off one end of a large chest freezer with rigid insulation and added a heater to be able to have two different temperature zones in one freezer.
It won’t be the most efficient, as both sides would be fighting each other, but I do believe it is possible.
It won’t be just the “sides” fighting each other. Most chest freezers function using coils in the wall. Some have all four walls filled with coils, others just three. Plus, if somebody owns a freezer large enough to divide; he or she spent about the same, or more, amount of money then the cost of two 7 cf freezers.
I love fermenting in cornies now - I took the guts out of the gas in connections and run some tubing into a growler of sanitiser. Benefits for me are being able to fit 2 in the chest freezer, easy to clean, no breakage risk like glass or scratch/harbor bacteria risk like plastic, and you can do oxygen free transfers from keg to keg with tubing running between the 2 liquid out connects.
I’m an all-grain brewer strictly of ales. I ferment in buckets, and maintain my fermentation temps by using a cold water bath with a wet towel covering the top of the bucket and some plastic juice bottles (nearly) filled with ice, as needed. I can easily keep my temps down to 60 - 62F in the dead of summer, in my basement (in Michigan). I transfer from bucket to keg (through a CO2 blanket) just using an auto-siphon. While this may not be a best practice for avoiding oxygen exposure, it has worked well for me so far (years).
I have an old (I mean REALLY old - I think it’s steam-powered) refrigerator that I’ve fitted to hold 4 cornies, with the CO2 tank outside, and three taps on the door (the fourth keg uses a picnic tap). If I have more than 4 kegs ready, the remainder just sit outside the kegerator until one kicks. Serving temp is usually mid 40s F. One minor benefit of the frig is that it has a smaller footprint than a chest freezer would. Also I don’t have to lift the kegs as far (I’m not lazy, just, umm, efficient). Also, it has a freezer section on top, which I use to store hops, spices, dry yeast and the unused frozen water bottles.
Now, if I was brewing lagers, I’d probably have to get a bit creative, and either drop the kegerator temp to the lagering range, get a dedicated ferm chamber or some such. But that’s not a consideration for me.
+1. I did the same for a couple years and had good results. Takes a little discipline the first few days of fermentation to keep the frozen bottles changed but I made good beer.
I do have the impression that you Amurigans serve beer on average at a much lower temperature than us, the proud people of Belgium. 90% of the beers I drink I do not put in the fridge but get them from the basement. Why couldn’t I put kegs in the basement?
I have a chest freezer + temp controller that serves double-duty as both my kegerator and fermentation chamber. It is far from ideal, since I can’t practically use it for both functions at the same time. At some time in the future I plan on acquiring a real kegerator, but I will make do with what I have for the time being.
If you want to serve your kegs at cellar temperature, then there’s no reason why you can’t. Just keep in mind that carbonation is a function of temperature, and you may see variable carbonation if you have big swings in temperature. That may also affect line balancing if you need to pressurize to different PSI values (or whatever your metric equivalent is) in different seasons.
This was what I was trying to refer to in my original post. That if you wanted to serve your beer warmer, then you could also ferment a lager and serve your beer at the same temps (around 50-55F) in your single chest freezer.
I found that if I changed the bottles (two at a time) morning and evening, my temps would stay pretty constant. Must be the large thermal mass of the water. I usually use this technique for maybe a week or so, then take the fermenter out to sit in the basement (usually about 65-67F) for a week or two longer to finish up.
