I foolishly set up for a lager batch this weekend without thinking about the fact that I already have a couple ales in the fermentation chamber. My garage is holding about 2°C, so I don’t need to warm it too much above ambient, and I only need to worry about it for maybe 4-7 days before it can go in the chamber with the ales.
Once fermentation kicks in it should help with keeping the temps up, but I’m wondering if anyone has a proven solution for warming a fermenter without temperature control. Warm water bath? Chemical hot packs? Move it in and out of the fermentation chamber a hundred times a day?
Standard $ 25-35 aquarium heaters have temperature ranges that do not go much below 70 F. The one I have theoretically goes down to 65 F but in fact goes down only as far as 67 F. Maybe you could use a water bath for your ales and put your lager into your fermenter?
I’ve never used the timer Denny refers to, but I can imagine that it would work.
I set mine to come on about 4-7 PM and go off 6-9 AM, depending on how cold it is. Between that and the thermostat on the aquarium heater it works really well.
I’m going to guess that if you get a smaller heater for the waterbath you use, it won’t be capable of heating the whole volume to a full 70F. Not sure if you’d risk burning it out doing that, though.
Edited to add: Aquarium heaters also usually are meant to be raising the tank temp above normal room temperature. If you’ve got this out in a 2C garage, you’re sure to not be able to get the water bath as warm with a heater as you would in a 21C house.
My timer has enough little plastic bits for 3-4 on/off cycles a day, so with a few days to play I should be able to get it to fluctuate within a pretty narrow band.
I wonder if I should pick up an aquarium heater, or just use my 1500 W heat stick.
Do you think the heat stick might be too much? I guess it’s a lot colder there than it is here, so between that and a timer it might be just the thing.
Running it for 15 min should heat 15 gal of water/beer by about 5°C, which is a pretty wide range, but not awful. If I can set it to run for 5-10 min instead, then that’s perfect. I’ll just have to take another look at my timer when I get home.
I put a heating pad near the fermentor and cover the whole thing with a blanket. I tape a meat thermometer with a long wired probe to the other side of the fermentor and insulate it so I can occasionally monitor the temperature.
Love these ideas! I needed to heat my stout up a few degrees to push the final gravity down a couple of more points. It was in my basement and fermenting slowly at 60 F and wanted it up around 65. I keep my carboys in plastic oil catchpans in case of spills or other disasters and just added some warm water. (Better Bottle, not glass) In about an hour I was up to 65 and changed the water every 6 hrs or so for two days. That brought my SG down a couple of points to where I wanted it.
But I like the fish heater idea and will play with that.
I’ve started using a Brew Belt on my last few brews, and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. I’ve gotten 3-gallons of beer in both a 6-gallon carboy and a 6.5 gallon bucket pretty much dead-on 8 degrees F above ambient every time.
MY LHBS has been promoting the Thermovest. They have been using it in their shop(which is based out of a warehouse) in MA, where it has been fridgidly cold before today. might be worth looking in to, altho they seem expensive.
I ended up having to buy a fancy new digital outlet timer, but after some playing around with it I figured out that running the electric element for 5 min every 4 hours kept the water bath within a range of a couple degrees. Long-term, I’ll probably build another temperature controller, but for an occasional need this setup seems to work pretty well.
