Moved from MD where I had homebrew store 2 miles away to NC where I no longer have basement and store is 45 minutes away. Use new Danby 7.0 mini-chest freezer and fairly new 3.5 cu ft GE mini-fridge which makes a good 30+ bottle fridge. They are all involved in a cycle, I'll start with everything empty. I've saved ICE empties with caps until I had about 50. They are filled with tap water. When Danby was first received, I used the temp probe from my Inkbird 1000 controller setup to regulate the freezer to 10 deg F. Good solid freeze. Note this baseline is not controlled by the Inkbird, was just using proble. Then switch the line feed for freezer to the Inkbird and used an 8 watt reptile warming pad as my heater and connected power cord to heat circuit of Inkbird. Took a little to get the compressor delay and range correct so the box did not cycle for no reason, but it's all set up. So my cycle: 1) IB = 15 deg to freeze 50 ICE water bottles. 2) On brew day, when I use the ICE bottles as 5lbs bag ice to chill and cycle small amount of tap water through dual coil immersion chiller, I set IB = 68 deg F (or whatever yeast needs) and just leave chest open during the boil which knocks off any chill/defrosts nicely. 3) When my 6.5 gal BB ferm jug gets set - blowoff and all - into the chest, lid goes down and the combo manages the environment +- 2deg F. 4) This continues at whatever temp I need for ales/lagers primary, secondary, and even after bottling if I want to do a controlled conditioning with varying temps. 5) When I decide it's "beer", the chest is basically a big reefer that handles the 50+ bottles with easy and occasionally supplements kitchen fridge. 6) When I get to < 30 bottles, or whatever room I have in the 3.5 GE, I transfer remainder, the ICE go back in as soon as kitchen fridge stuff is moved, including fishing worms (story for another time) and the IB = 15 deg F to start the cycle again. Only water wasted is small amount in galvanized tub to cycle from stack of ICE bottles through chiller and whatever boiloff I have. The tub water does do second duty as first washup water before it goes down drain.
Topic: First lager! (Read 14632 times)
