New Fermentation Chamber

Some wise people have said that brewers make wort (the sweet liquid extracted from grains, boiled with hops) and that yeast make beer.  There is a great deal of truth to that - the yeast are the ones who do the work, eat up the sugars and change the sugary wort (pronounced wert) into delicious beer.  As a brewer, my job is to provide them the best possible environment and conditions in which to do that work.  Hence the latest addition to our brewing area:

 This looks like a small freezer, and it is.  But to me, it is a fermentation chamber - a temperature controlled area where my yeast can do their business.  I've always controlled fermentation temperatures, but this setup allows me to do so with more precision and fewer fluctuations.  Each variety of yeast has its own temperature sweet spots, a range actually, and this allows me to hit that range.  Generally, lower temperatures in the range will help the yeast produce fewer compounds that we perceive as off-flavors, like strong esters or hot alcohol flavors.  

 Above is a digital temperature controller.  It has a probe (the grey wire) that goes into the freezer and monitors the temps.  The controller functions as a switch - the freezer's power cord plugs into the controller and the controller plugs into the wall outlet, controlling when the freezer turns on and off.  For the current batch in the chamber, I have the controller set for a maximum temperature of 63F.  There is still some fluctuation in the temps, in that by the time the controller turns off the freezer, the temp will still fall a few degrees, usually down to about 60F.  For the beer I am making and the yeast I am using, that range (60-63F) is just what I'm looking for.  

Here is the inside of the chamber.  The beer is an American Wheat style, a lighter style, which I will be using as a base to make a raspberry beer.  After this fermentation is done, I will rack the beer from this carboy (off the yeast cake) into another carboy with raspberry puree.  The yeast will wake up when they sense the presence of new sugars to eat and start up a secondary fermentation.  

The tubing in the picture above is called a blow-off tube - it runs from the carboy in which the beer is fermenting to a jug of water, which functions as an airlock.  As the yeast produce CO2 and pressure builds within the carboy, the gas pushes up through the tubing, into the jug of water, and then up through the water until it is released to the air.  No air, though, gets through the water jug/airlock the other direction - this is important because air carries lots of wild yeasts and we want to keep those away from our beer.  

I bought the small freezer on our local Craigslist, and its funny ad made me smile.  Here's my paraphrase:

Small, five cubic foot freezer for sale, $50.  He used to store his meat in it.  Now he's gone and I want this gone, too.  

The good news is that when I picked it up, I didn't find him chopped up and in the freezer.