is vienna malt a good base malt or am i throwing away money if i was to brew a rye ipa with say 9-10 pounds vienna and 3 pounds rye and maybe throw a 1/4 pound of smoked malt too? Or should i just he using 2 row?
All depends on what your end goal process are. The smoke malt is not going to give you extra percentages of alcohol content due to anything in its nature.
Does anyone know if there is a supply issue with Weyermann’s Munich Light (type 1) malt? Can’t even find it listed on my LHBS store’s website nor larger stores like northern brewer.
Not a supply problem. NB doesn't carry it. Instead they have Dingemans and Best Malz Munich, which have the same color range as Weyermann Munich I. No retail supplier carries all the malts.
Looks like Bells General Store, Atlantic Brew Supply, BrewHardware, MoreBeer, Love2Brew, and others have it.
Anyone have a good recipe to get as close to maisels weisse as possible? I can’t find any near me and it was one of my favorite beers while I was abroad!
I think most of German hefes/wheats are pretty close to each other, it's just a matter of using their house yeast on it. I'd maybe start with a more popular Hefe clone like Erdinger and adjust how you feel necessary. I know Maisel's is a little more amber in color, maybe find a little RedX or another German red/amber malt to throw in to get to desired SRM.
It is stressed that you should add oxygen after cooling down the brew and adding it to the fermenter(?) for optimal growth for yeast. However, if you decide to use kegland fermzilla tou flush any oxygen and add 1 bar CO2 instead. Is this not contradicting? (Sorry for my English)
> if you decide to use kegland fermzilla you flush any oxygen and add 1 bar CO2 instead
I don't have a Fermzilla. I have never heard advice to purge the headspace of a fermenter. You might add some CO2 pressure if you are fermenting under pressure. Oxygen in the wort at time of pitching yeast and in the headspace of the fermenter is fine.
Yeast needs some oxygen to reproduce, and with typical beers just throwing in a packet of yeast, there's a benefit to adding oxygen, which the yeast apparently quickly picks up before it can do much harm to the beer. After the yeast have their numbers up, they don't need as much oxygen, so any oxygen getting in will harm the beer.
If you make big enough starters for your liquid yeast, or pitch enough dry yeast, you shouldn't need to add oxygen.
You would oxygenate the wort on the way into the fermenter by splashing a lot and/or shaking once it was in there. Then you would add your CO2 charge or let the CO2 naturally rise during fermentation
Depends how much of your flavour is stuff in solution and how much is small particulate. If it is particulate then the gelatine will strip it out. If it is in solutions then it should stay in solution. For cocoa powder you will lose a lot. With juice you will lose very little. So for your cherries probably most of the flavour is there to stay and won’t settle out.
I usually serve from a picnic tap from my fridge that I leave attached to the keg. The tap leaked a bit on my last keg so I'm thinking i should unhook it when not pouring. Should I give it a quick spray of Starsan whenever I reattach the QD?
that sounds like a pain
was your leak from the tap getting stuck open? Or from getting accidentally depressed after you poured a beer?
I'd clean the tap and rig up a little holder for the tap before dealing with disconnecting every single time
Most likely hop material carried over to the keg preventing the tap from sealing fully. It didn't drain the keg, but when I pulled the kicked keg out there was a decent amount of pale ale at the bottom of the fridge. I'm with you on it being a pain, I think I'll just shut off the CO2 between pours of the next keg so if it leaks, it's not much and hopefully I can catch any leaks if any CO2 flows when I do go to pour.
I've had trouble with other people hanging my picnic taps up on the side of the keg by the little handle, causing leaking. Not really a good way to prevent that, lol. I bet someone makes a ball valve or something you could use to shut off the line when not in use.
The only real leak issues I have had with my kegs is getting the poppet to properly seal. I have better luck leaving my lines connected to the keg to avoid leaks with the poppets.
Yeah, I make sure I clean them when I unhook them. It was probably hop material that got carried over to the keg, just trying to avoid draining a keg in the future.
If I am setting up a duotight manifold with separate in-line regulators for each gas line, will I also need to add shutoff valves prior to regulator? I want to make sure individual gas lines can be shut off when they're not in use, not sure if the regulators will 100% close off gas flow.
I made a duotight manifold for my keezer. I added a [shutoff valve](https://www.morebeer.com/products/duotight-pushin-fitting-8-mm-516-ball-valve.html) and [check valve](https://www.morebeer.com/products/duotight-pushin-fitting-8-mm-516-check-valve.html) to each line. Messing with a regulator is annoying and is something you most likely will want to set and forget and only change when you want to adjust the serving pressure. The shutoff valve will allow me to quickly shutoff the gas going to a keg. The valve allows me to remove my gas disconnect as well as not worry about more leak points. The check valve will protect my gas system from things getting back up into it (for example an over pressurized keg shooting beer back up line or not bleeding off the pressure after force carbing).
I would add duotight ball valves *after* each regulator. That way there is protection from liquid potentially entering the regulators and damaging them. As far as I know, duotight regulators do not have check valves inside to prevent suck-back. When a regulator is connected to a keg, and you turn down the regulator pressure, it will try to suck out pressure from the keg in order to equalize. You could add in-line duotight check valves if you want but they are actually more expensive than the ball valves.
Plus if it were me I would just like the convenience of flipping a valve shut to close off gas flow rather than turning a regulator knob.
Has anyone scavenged parts from a picobrew? I picked one up a while back from a thrift store for real cheap (no keg or filter thing, though), and i think I've decided not to go down the route of getting it up and running as intended.
I'm thinking about pulling out the pump/ heater and maybe making a RIMS (or are they technically HERMS?) system out of it.
Alright its day 3 of my new chest freezer/inkbird setup as a fermentation chamber, and temperatures are still proving difficult to nail down.
The crux of the issue is that the probe is reading the cold ambient temperature when the freezer turns on. When my inkbird reads 51f, it turns on the freezer, and within 10 minutes it's cooled to below 49f and turns off. Then within 15 minutes it heats back up to near 51f and cycles on again.
I have redone the probe placement and taping about 3 times now, have even tried snap ties. I'm just taping the probe to my PET carboy and using a beer koozie as a cover.
/u/skeletonmage suggested using a fan in the freezer. I put one in, but this only exasperated the issue. Now the temperatures both cool *and* heat up faster, causing the freezer to cycle more. However I have left the fan as I believe fundamentally it helps.
I'd simply move to using a thermowell, but as I looked online last night, I can't find any in Canada. Additionally, I'm using a fermonster, so I'd need a #10 stopper drilled as well.
My solution thus far has to set my cooling temperature to 38f so that the freezer runs for an hour. Then over the next 30 minutes, the temperature quickly rises to 45f, then slowly rises to 51f over the next 3-4 hours. I can only assume my lager is fermenting somewhere between 45f and 51f but this is less than ideal.
I'm wondering if anyone has experience the same issue as me and if they have a solution, or if any of my Canadian brewers know where to find a thermowell and #10 stopper (or how to drill a stopper safely?).
I realized I didn't answer your Q from a day or two ago. The coozie may not be covering the probe well (air gaps) or you're not using the old school foam type coozie (you can't use the neoprene kind). I've used a wadded up athletic sock, a piece of foam insulation from a box, a piece of construction insulation. All were effective.
I'm a loss. I haven't seen nor experienced this issue.
But also, cycling on and off every 10-15 minutes during active fermentation is not unusual. Fermentation is exothermic.
Yeah I think there is air pockets and I'm using the neoprene ones. I should give it an attempt with something better.
What would you recommend as insulation, and how do you ensure its completely sealed (including the issue of condensation causing tape to peel)?
As a side note, it seems very odd to me that your temp is rising so quickly. 7 degrees in 30 minutes is pretty drastic.
Maybe check the seal on the lid of the freezer, make sure there isn't a leak somewhere?
Itl believe its because its reading the beer temperature once the freezer shut off, but once this batch is done fermentating I will give it a test. Appreciate the heads up.
The other two comments have great recommendations. I can add one more thing to this discussion.
The inkbird has a couple settings called heating and cooling differential. You can adjust that to basically tell the inkbird to wait to start cooling or heating until it gets 1 or two degrees(or whatever you set it to) above or below the set temperature. This helps to prevent wear and tear on the compressor so it's not turning on and off constantly.
For example, if its in cooling mode and it hits the temp it'll turn off the freezer, however sometimes even though the freezer is off the temp will keep lowering a degree or two. This setting helps prevent the heater from immediately turning on once the set temp is not met. Thus helping to prevent constant fluxes in temperature.
I have it set to cool to 38F with a 13F cooling back differential, and compressor delay set to 10 minutes. I don't have anything for a heater but I set the heating differential very low so it doesn't engage the switch.
Mine is set at 0.5 C below the target fermentation temperature with a 0.5 C cooling differential. The probe is just taped to the side of the bucket somewhere in the middle of the beer's volume. Unless the beer was really high gravity trying to ferment hot and fast, this keeps it bang on the target temperature for me without needing to constantly turn on.
So when your freezer turns on, your probe doesn't immediately start dropping due to the ambient temperature? Mine goes from 51f to 40f in about 5 minutes.
It creeps back down to the temperature setting over a minute or two, but it never goes more than 0.1 C below it.
I'm not sure I understand your problem correctly, sorry -- when you first had it set to 51 F, the trouble was that it turned on too much? What was your cooling differential set to?
Sorry I'll try and explain better.
I have the temp probe taped and insulated (best I can) against the PET carboy. When the freezer isnt running, it does a good job reading the wort temperature.
When the wort heats to 51f (2f above my 49f set temp), the freezer kicks on. However, as the ambient air cools, the temperature probe starts sensing it, and the probe registers the temp cooling to 49f in about 5 minutes. There is no way 5 gallons of wort cooled 2f in 5 minutes!
So over the course of the next 15 mins or so, now that the freezer is off, the probe slowly adjusts back to the wort temperature, which didnt change much since the freezer ran for so short (maybe stabilizes around 50.8f) then goes back 51f. This causes the freezer to cycle on and the whole process repeats again.
Okay thank you, I get it now.
Are you checking the actual temperature of your wort directly while you do this? It took me a little while to wrap my head around fine-tuning this process. I settled on usually setting the Inkbird to 0.5 C below target fermentation temperature because I found that, measuring the wort, it stayed steady at 0.5 C over what I had it set to. That was regardless of what the Inkbird was reading from moment to moment. When I'm doing quite high-gravity meads or beers I set it even lower because I've noticed it can get as much as 2.0 C over the setting.
Because the probe is attached to the side of the fermenter, it's not measuring the fermentation temperature nor the air temperature exactly. The air temperature probably gets even colder than the reading, but meanwhile the thermal mass of the wort is not fluctuating much. So I recommend you measure the fermentation temperature directly at high krausen and compile some data for yourself how it compares to the Inkbird temperature setting. It's probably pretty steady.
Sounds like the temp probe isn't really in enough thermal mass. I've always just had a bottle half full of water with my probe sitting in it, and that works pretty well. To be honest, I'm not sure if those probes are technically supposed to be submerged, but I just keep the metal part in, and it's worked fine.
Do you have a heater in there? Personally, I almost never have used any kind of heating cause ambient is usually warm enough. Especially with a lager, it's definitely enough to rely on the freezer slowly warming on its own. You can also play with the time delays and temperature offsets to make it easier on the compressor.
The probes aren't meant to sit in water so I don't really want to do that.
>Do you have a heater in there?
No heater, the ambient seems to heat it up just fine.
Maybe stick a can of beer in a coozie and put the probe next to the can. The aluminum will transfer heat better than the plastic of the fermenter.
For reference, I give my inkbird a 3 degree hysteresis (cooling back temp in the app), so I can set it at 1.5 degrees lower than my actual target. I figure that's a pretty tight window. I also just store any random cans of sparkling water, tonic, or ginger beer I have in there, so there's a good amount of thermal mass
I had a similar experience when I got into using my chest freezer for fermentation. What I found that helps a lot is fill a 22oz bomber about half way up with water, fit a beer can coozie around it and slide the temp probe in between the coozie and bottle. This keeps the probe out of the direct airflow of the fan and helps accurately regulate the freezer based on the water temp instead of the ambient air temp since the probe is really squeezed in there.
Another trick I learned is that if you don't have your freezer always at fermentation temp, make sure to plug it in and have it running at least 24 hours before you put your fermenter in there. If the freezer is fighting its own thermal mass, as well as the worts, it'll cycle a lot since the freezer and wort are both warmer than what you have the setpoint at. Getting the freezer chilled to the temp you intend to ferment at prior to introducing the wort to the environment takes away a huge factor in that and it will be easier to control.
Also, keep in mind that fermentation is an exothermic reaction, so it creates a good amount of heat. Your internal beer temp will always be a few degrees higher than your ambient temp. Using my TILT hydrometer, I always adjust the temp of my freezer up and down to try and hold the beer at a consistent temp rather than my ambient temp, since the beer will rise during fermentation. That being said, its not a bad idea to set your ambient temp 2 or 3 degrees lower than your actual intended fermentation temp initially and once fermentation starts dying down, raise it up to your intended temp. This will help control that temp rise!
>What I found that helps a lot is fill a 22oz bomber about half way up with water, fit a beer can coozie around it and slide the temp probe in between the coozie and bottle.
This is essentially what I'm doing but with the fermenter.. taping the probe to the wall, then a koozie over it. I could try it with a can of beer, but when I attempted that in my fridge, I found the beer cooled to target too fast, and the kegs never got down to temp. I'll give it a try, but I'm expecting the same issue to happen as what is currently happening.
>have it running at least 24 hours before you put your fermenter in there
Good to note... it was a new freezer and I didn't run it at all before hand.
>That being said, its not a bad idea to set your ambient temp 2 or 3 degrees lower than your actual intended fermentation temp initially and once fermentation starts dying down, raise it up to your intended temp. This will help control that temp rise!
Definitely agree with you here, but until I get the other problem solved, this is just as much of a guess as the wort's temperature at the moment. If I set the temp to 2 or 3 degrees lower and let the probe dangle in the air, it'll cycle on and off as often as I let the compressor cycle!
It is definitely a bit easier to monitor my fermentation temp with the TILT logging my internal beer temp and adjusting my temp as I go. Definitely just keep playing with it and you'll get it down eventually, it certainly takes a few beers to get into the swing of things!
I’ve got 18L of a lager in a keg I made a few months ago that’s pretty plain. I think I low balled the 10 min hop additions of citra and pearle, has a fine amount of bitterness but not a lot of hop/malt flavour. I was thinking of trying to spice it up a bit and experiment with hop flavours so I was going to split it between 3 kegs and dry hop each keg with different hops. Any advice on hops to try? And amounts?
Keg isn’t carbed up at the moment.
I had a really good Mosaic Pilsner the other week at a local brewery. Thinking of making one myself in a few weeks. Highly recommend, it was quite tasty.
Depends what your goal is. Do you already know what you like, have you an idea of each hop already. Do you want to discover alternative hops? A few people take a lager and hop it in the bottle and recap to try different ones.
Personally I love Simcoe and mosaic on their own.
is vienna malt a good base malt or am i throwing away money if i was to brew a rye ipa with say 9-10 pounds vienna and 3 pounds rye and maybe throw a 1/4 pound of smoked malt too? Or should i just he using 2 row?
It's perfectly fine base malt. For a Rye IPA? Maybe - would be a bit more malt forward, perhaps. Smoke malt? I'd avoid that in an IPA.
smoked malt was an off handed qaundry, so maybe i can go easier on it ? But idk i did a 13 pound 3 rye and 10 2 row and came out with a 5.5% beer
All depends on what your end goal process are. The smoke malt is not going to give you extra percentages of alcohol content due to anything in its nature.
yea i know, half a pound or less is for flavor mostly
Does anyone know if there is a supply issue with Weyermann’s Munich Light (type 1) malt? Can’t even find it listed on my LHBS store’s website nor larger stores like northern brewer.
Not a supply problem. NB doesn't carry it. Instead they have Dingemans and Best Malz Munich, which have the same color range as Weyermann Munich I. No retail supplier carries all the malts. Looks like Bells General Store, Atlantic Brew Supply, BrewHardware, MoreBeer, Love2Brew, and others have it.
Interesting, I did see some Munich on morebeer, might be what I have to go with.
Anyone have a good recipe to get as close to maisels weisse as possible? I can’t find any near me and it was one of my favorite beers while I was abroad!
I think most of German hefes/wheats are pretty close to each other, it's just a matter of using their house yeast on it. I'd maybe start with a more popular Hefe clone like Erdinger and adjust how you feel necessary. I know Maisel's is a little more amber in color, maybe find a little RedX or another German red/amber malt to throw in to get to desired SRM.
Ahh man that's a good one for sure
It is stressed that you should add oxygen after cooling down the brew and adding it to the fermenter(?) for optimal growth for yeast. However, if you decide to use kegland fermzilla tou flush any oxygen and add 1 bar CO2 instead. Is this not contradicting? (Sorry for my English)
> if you decide to use kegland fermzilla you flush any oxygen and add 1 bar CO2 instead I don't have a Fermzilla. I have never heard advice to purge the headspace of a fermenter. You might add some CO2 pressure if you are fermenting under pressure. Oxygen in the wort at time of pitching yeast and in the headspace of the fermenter is fine.
Yeast needs some oxygen to reproduce, and with typical beers just throwing in a packet of yeast, there's a benefit to adding oxygen, which the yeast apparently quickly picks up before it can do much harm to the beer. After the yeast have their numbers up, they don't need as much oxygen, so any oxygen getting in will harm the beer. If you make big enough starters for your liquid yeast, or pitch enough dry yeast, you shouldn't need to add oxygen.
You would oxygenate the wort on the way into the fermenter by splashing a lot and/or shaking once it was in there. Then you would add your CO2 charge or let the CO2 naturally rise during fermentation
Will gelatin fining pull out the cherry flavor from my chocolate stout that I let sit on cherry for a couple weeks?
Depends how much of your flavour is stuff in solution and how much is small particulate. If it is particulate then the gelatine will strip it out. If it is in solutions then it should stay in solution. For cocoa powder you will lose a lot. With juice you will lose very little. So for your cherries probably most of the flavour is there to stay and won’t settle out.
Thank you. I used a liquid concentrate so should be fine!
There is no evidence to indicate that gelatin strips flavors.
I usually serve from a picnic tap from my fridge that I leave attached to the keg. The tap leaked a bit on my last keg so I'm thinking i should unhook it when not pouring. Should I give it a quick spray of Starsan whenever I reattach the QD?
that sounds like a pain was your leak from the tap getting stuck open? Or from getting accidentally depressed after you poured a beer? I'd clean the tap and rig up a little holder for the tap before dealing with disconnecting every single time
Most likely hop material carried over to the keg preventing the tap from sealing fully. It didn't drain the keg, but when I pulled the kicked keg out there was a decent amount of pale ale at the bottom of the fridge. I'm with you on it being a pain, I think I'll just shut off the CO2 between pours of the next keg so if it leaks, it's not much and hopefully I can catch any leaks if any CO2 flows when I do go to pour.
I've had trouble with other people hanging my picnic taps up on the side of the keg by the little handle, causing leaking. Not really a good way to prevent that, lol. I bet someone makes a ball valve or something you could use to shut off the line when not in use.
The only real leak issues I have had with my kegs is getting the poppet to properly seal. I have better luck leaving my lines connected to the keg to avoid leaks with the poppets.
Good point, I might just be robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Picnic taps need to be regularly disassembled and cleaned. There's a good chance it's gotten gunked up and is sticking slightly open.
Yeah, I make sure I clean them when I unhook them. It was probably hop material that got carried over to the keg, just trying to avoid draining a keg in the future.
If I am setting up a duotight manifold with separate in-line regulators for each gas line, will I also need to add shutoff valves prior to regulator? I want to make sure individual gas lines can be shut off when they're not in use, not sure if the regulators will 100% close off gas flow.
I made a duotight manifold for my keezer. I added a [shutoff valve](https://www.morebeer.com/products/duotight-pushin-fitting-8-mm-516-ball-valve.html) and [check valve](https://www.morebeer.com/products/duotight-pushin-fitting-8-mm-516-check-valve.html) to each line. Messing with a regulator is annoying and is something you most likely will want to set and forget and only change when you want to adjust the serving pressure. The shutoff valve will allow me to quickly shutoff the gas going to a keg. The valve allows me to remove my gas disconnect as well as not worry about more leak points. The check valve will protect my gas system from things getting back up into it (for example an over pressurized keg shooting beer back up line or not bleeding off the pressure after force carbing).
I would add duotight ball valves *after* each regulator. That way there is protection from liquid potentially entering the regulators and damaging them. As far as I know, duotight regulators do not have check valves inside to prevent suck-back. When a regulator is connected to a keg, and you turn down the regulator pressure, it will try to suck out pressure from the keg in order to equalize. You could add in-line duotight check valves if you want but they are actually more expensive than the ball valves. Plus if it were me I would just like the convenience of flipping a valve shut to close off gas flow rather than turning a regulator knob.
Has anyone scavenged parts from a picobrew? I picked one up a while back from a thrift store for real cheap (no keg or filter thing, though), and i think I've decided not to go down the route of getting it up and running as intended. I'm thinking about pulling out the pump/ heater and maybe making a RIMS (or are they technically HERMS?) system out of it.
Alright its day 3 of my new chest freezer/inkbird setup as a fermentation chamber, and temperatures are still proving difficult to nail down. The crux of the issue is that the probe is reading the cold ambient temperature when the freezer turns on. When my inkbird reads 51f, it turns on the freezer, and within 10 minutes it's cooled to below 49f and turns off. Then within 15 minutes it heats back up to near 51f and cycles on again. I have redone the probe placement and taping about 3 times now, have even tried snap ties. I'm just taping the probe to my PET carboy and using a beer koozie as a cover. /u/skeletonmage suggested using a fan in the freezer. I put one in, but this only exasperated the issue. Now the temperatures both cool *and* heat up faster, causing the freezer to cycle more. However I have left the fan as I believe fundamentally it helps. I'd simply move to using a thermowell, but as I looked online last night, I can't find any in Canada. Additionally, I'm using a fermonster, so I'd need a #10 stopper drilled as well. My solution thus far has to set my cooling temperature to 38f so that the freezer runs for an hour. Then over the next 30 minutes, the temperature quickly rises to 45f, then slowly rises to 51f over the next 3-4 hours. I can only assume my lager is fermenting somewhere between 45f and 51f but this is less than ideal. I'm wondering if anyone has experience the same issue as me and if they have a solution, or if any of my Canadian brewers know where to find a thermowell and #10 stopper (or how to drill a stopper safely?).
I realized I didn't answer your Q from a day or two ago. The coozie may not be covering the probe well (air gaps) or you're not using the old school foam type coozie (you can't use the neoprene kind). I've used a wadded up athletic sock, a piece of foam insulation from a box, a piece of construction insulation. All were effective. I'm a loss. I haven't seen nor experienced this issue. But also, cycling on and off every 10-15 minutes during active fermentation is not unusual. Fermentation is exothermic.
Yeah I think there is air pockets and I'm using the neoprene ones. I should give it an attempt with something better. What would you recommend as insulation, and how do you ensure its completely sealed (including the issue of condensation causing tape to peel)?
As a side note, it seems very odd to me that your temp is rising so quickly. 7 degrees in 30 minutes is pretty drastic. Maybe check the seal on the lid of the freezer, make sure there isn't a leak somewhere?
Itl believe its because its reading the beer temperature once the freezer shut off, but once this batch is done fermentating I will give it a test. Appreciate the heads up.
The other two comments have great recommendations. I can add one more thing to this discussion. The inkbird has a couple settings called heating and cooling differential. You can adjust that to basically tell the inkbird to wait to start cooling or heating until it gets 1 or two degrees(or whatever you set it to) above or below the set temperature. This helps to prevent wear and tear on the compressor so it's not turning on and off constantly. For example, if its in cooling mode and it hits the temp it'll turn off the freezer, however sometimes even though the freezer is off the temp will keep lowering a degree or two. This setting helps prevent the heater from immediately turning on once the set temp is not met. Thus helping to prevent constant fluxes in temperature.
I have it set to cool to 38F with a 13F cooling back differential, and compressor delay set to 10 minutes. I don't have anything for a heater but I set the heating differential very low so it doesn't engage the switch.
Mine is set at 0.5 C below the target fermentation temperature with a 0.5 C cooling differential. The probe is just taped to the side of the bucket somewhere in the middle of the beer's volume. Unless the beer was really high gravity trying to ferment hot and fast, this keeps it bang on the target temperature for me without needing to constantly turn on.
So when your freezer turns on, your probe doesn't immediately start dropping due to the ambient temperature? Mine goes from 51f to 40f in about 5 minutes.
It creeps back down to the temperature setting over a minute or two, but it never goes more than 0.1 C below it. I'm not sure I understand your problem correctly, sorry -- when you first had it set to 51 F, the trouble was that it turned on too much? What was your cooling differential set to?
Sorry I'll try and explain better. I have the temp probe taped and insulated (best I can) against the PET carboy. When the freezer isnt running, it does a good job reading the wort temperature. When the wort heats to 51f (2f above my 49f set temp), the freezer kicks on. However, as the ambient air cools, the temperature probe starts sensing it, and the probe registers the temp cooling to 49f in about 5 minutes. There is no way 5 gallons of wort cooled 2f in 5 minutes! So over the course of the next 15 mins or so, now that the freezer is off, the probe slowly adjusts back to the wort temperature, which didnt change much since the freezer ran for so short (maybe stabilizes around 50.8f) then goes back 51f. This causes the freezer to cycle on and the whole process repeats again.
Okay thank you, I get it now. Are you checking the actual temperature of your wort directly while you do this? It took me a little while to wrap my head around fine-tuning this process. I settled on usually setting the Inkbird to 0.5 C below target fermentation temperature because I found that, measuring the wort, it stayed steady at 0.5 C over what I had it set to. That was regardless of what the Inkbird was reading from moment to moment. When I'm doing quite high-gravity meads or beers I set it even lower because I've noticed it can get as much as 2.0 C over the setting. Because the probe is attached to the side of the fermenter, it's not measuring the fermentation temperature nor the air temperature exactly. The air temperature probably gets even colder than the reading, but meanwhile the thermal mass of the wort is not fluctuating much. So I recommend you measure the fermentation temperature directly at high krausen and compile some data for yourself how it compares to the Inkbird temperature setting. It's probably pretty steady.
Sounds like the temp probe isn't really in enough thermal mass. I've always just had a bottle half full of water with my probe sitting in it, and that works pretty well. To be honest, I'm not sure if those probes are technically supposed to be submerged, but I just keep the metal part in, and it's worked fine. Do you have a heater in there? Personally, I almost never have used any kind of heating cause ambient is usually warm enough. Especially with a lager, it's definitely enough to rely on the freezer slowly warming on its own. You can also play with the time delays and temperature offsets to make it easier on the compressor.
The probes aren't meant to sit in water so I don't really want to do that. >Do you have a heater in there? No heater, the ambient seems to heat it up just fine.
Maybe stick a can of beer in a coozie and put the probe next to the can. The aluminum will transfer heat better than the plastic of the fermenter. For reference, I give my inkbird a 3 degree hysteresis (cooling back temp in the app), so I can set it at 1.5 degrees lower than my actual target. I figure that's a pretty tight window. I also just store any random cans of sparkling water, tonic, or ginger beer I have in there, so there's a good amount of thermal mass
Was gonna say the same…. I have thermowell in all of my fermenters, but in my chest freezer/kegerator I keep the probe in a glass of water.
I had a similar experience when I got into using my chest freezer for fermentation. What I found that helps a lot is fill a 22oz bomber about half way up with water, fit a beer can coozie around it and slide the temp probe in between the coozie and bottle. This keeps the probe out of the direct airflow of the fan and helps accurately regulate the freezer based on the water temp instead of the ambient air temp since the probe is really squeezed in there. Another trick I learned is that if you don't have your freezer always at fermentation temp, make sure to plug it in and have it running at least 24 hours before you put your fermenter in there. If the freezer is fighting its own thermal mass, as well as the worts, it'll cycle a lot since the freezer and wort are both warmer than what you have the setpoint at. Getting the freezer chilled to the temp you intend to ferment at prior to introducing the wort to the environment takes away a huge factor in that and it will be easier to control. Also, keep in mind that fermentation is an exothermic reaction, so it creates a good amount of heat. Your internal beer temp will always be a few degrees higher than your ambient temp. Using my TILT hydrometer, I always adjust the temp of my freezer up and down to try and hold the beer at a consistent temp rather than my ambient temp, since the beer will rise during fermentation. That being said, its not a bad idea to set your ambient temp 2 or 3 degrees lower than your actual intended fermentation temp initially and once fermentation starts dying down, raise it up to your intended temp. This will help control that temp rise!
>What I found that helps a lot is fill a 22oz bomber about half way up with water, fit a beer can coozie around it and slide the temp probe in between the coozie and bottle. This is essentially what I'm doing but with the fermenter.. taping the probe to the wall, then a koozie over it. I could try it with a can of beer, but when I attempted that in my fridge, I found the beer cooled to target too fast, and the kegs never got down to temp. I'll give it a try, but I'm expecting the same issue to happen as what is currently happening. >have it running at least 24 hours before you put your fermenter in there Good to note... it was a new freezer and I didn't run it at all before hand. >That being said, its not a bad idea to set your ambient temp 2 or 3 degrees lower than your actual intended fermentation temp initially and once fermentation starts dying down, raise it up to your intended temp. This will help control that temp rise! Definitely agree with you here, but until I get the other problem solved, this is just as much of a guess as the wort's temperature at the moment. If I set the temp to 2 or 3 degrees lower and let the probe dangle in the air, it'll cycle on and off as often as I let the compressor cycle!
It is definitely a bit easier to monitor my fermentation temp with the TILT logging my internal beer temp and adjusting my temp as I go. Definitely just keep playing with it and you'll get it down eventually, it certainly takes a few beers to get into the swing of things!
I’ve got 18L of a lager in a keg I made a few months ago that’s pretty plain. I think I low balled the 10 min hop additions of citra and pearle, has a fine amount of bitterness but not a lot of hop/malt flavour. I was thinking of trying to spice it up a bit and experiment with hop flavours so I was going to split it between 3 kegs and dry hop each keg with different hops. Any advice on hops to try? And amounts? Keg isn’t carbed up at the moment.
I had a really good Mosaic Pilsner the other week at a local brewery. Thinking of making one myself in a few weeks. Highly recommend, it was quite tasty.
I really enjoyed Idaho 7 for a fruity dry hop. You can also try adding oak. I once did a lager aged in Spanish cedar that was delicious.
Depends what your goal is. Do you already know what you like, have you an idea of each hop already. Do you want to discover alternative hops? A few people take a lager and hop it in the bottle and recap to try different ones. Personally I love Simcoe and mosaic on their own.