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Fermentation Temp Control


Red Pine

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Hi All,

I'm curious to know what people are doing for controlling their fermentation temperature. I've been looking at the different options available while shopping for my fermenters. Do you use tanks with dimpled or channeled jackets already built into them? Do you wrap a tank blanket around them and use that? (here's a link to one particular site that I've been looking at for this option http://www.powerblanket.com/fermentation-cooling) Do you have glycol in your jacket or cooling water? In my view glycol would be concerning because of the possibility of a leak. Or maybe you don't do any temperature control at all and let the variability add another element to your product? I've obviously geared this towards cooling the fermenters as they will warm as fermentation proceeds, but perhaps some of you heat your fermenters instead of cooling. Interested in hearing what everyone thinks and how they handle temperature control during fermentation. Thanks!

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Jacketed tanks are probably the only option worth talking about. Your chiller loop can operate with pure water or with a glycol mix, disadvantage of pure water is lowest temperature you can reach has to be above freezing. Adding glycol to the mix allows you to bring the chiller supply temp down to the 20s which is useful if you want to chill filter, or if you are doing beer and want to cold stabilize and carbonate for bottling the beer, but this is at a cost, because food grade glycol (which you want in case of leak) is significantly more expensive than water.

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Depending on the temperature of your environment, we found you don't really need external cooling of fermenters until you get north of ~500 gal batches. When we fermented in 1000L poly ibc totes, we'd see a maybe 4-5 F rise after pitching which was acceptable for the yeast we were using. At smaller sizes it was more challenging to keep the ferments warm enough in the winter.

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  • 4 weeks later...

without temperature control, some mount of agitation (manual or otherwise) (to keep the yeast in contact with sugar laden substrate and reduce temperature stratification) without introduction oxygen (anaerobic fermentation) and the addition of some nitrogen (DAP, etc.) you are loosing at least 10% of your yield.....so if you could make an extra 10% $$ for your efforts at what ever scale you are operating at why would you not make that investment?

GW Kent has small panels you could move from small tank-to-tank and circulated water/glycol if you are using plastic tanks and cheap little temperature controllers to heat or cool based on your optimal set point....

may even be rational at a small scale 

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