With the new (to me) house, I am still learning my way around where the best place to brew is (day and night editions), where the best place to store equipment is, and where to ferment. It’s important to know where you can maintain fermentation temperatures in your living space.
In the winter time, it was easy…I just set up my heating pad rig with a blanket in the basement and I was good to go!
Now that it is spring, the basement may be too warm for the rig to be optimal. It may make things too hot. I just don’t know my basement well enough yet.
On top of that, we here in the Northeast experienced some fairly warm temperatures over the past 5 days. We broke records in Boston with 93 degrees yesterday making the temperature in the house pretty balmy.
Thankfully, the small closet near the front of the house saved the day. Not sure if it is just really insulated well or what, but the ambient temperature in the closet stayed cool. My fermentation bucket stayed right in the range it needed to be.
I have put the bucket in this closet before, but it was winter and I think my heating pad rig worked better.
Now I know where to ferment in non-winter months. Until I get a fridge with a thermostat, this knowledge is valuable.
Some photos of the fermentation closet:
Alan
When the summer hits Tokyo I don’t think I’ll have anywhere that would be suitable for brewing – lucky you to find somewhere!
My thinking is to brew lagers over the summer and use either my main fridge where I store my groceries (it’s large enough that I can take out some shelves) or turn the temp up in my kegerator and use that. At “English bitter” temps, I could probably serve one keg and ferment a lager at the same time.
Steve
I use a Igloo Cube with a lid made out of Styrofoam. I use a frozen 2 liter bottle to keep the temps down. I have to swap it out about every other day. I can hold 60 F pretty easily with this setup even in a 100 F garage. If I use more then 1 2 liter I can get down to lager temps.
Steve
Here is a link to a similar Igloo Cube setup. http://is.gd/vB65
Señor Brew
Yeah John, fermentation temperature is really important. I’ve been fermenting lagers in the basement of my coach house all winter, but I think we just hit the point where I’ll have to start refrigeration. I keep a bottle of water on the floor of the basement and take a temperature reading occasionally–the last reading was 56F. I assume that fermentation temps are about 5 degrees fahrenheit higher than the ambient water temp. The upside of this is that I can now ferment ales down there without any heating instead of fermenting them upstairs in the main house.
John
I forgot to add a link to the swamp cooler post Mike put up:
Swamp Cooler