How to Dedicate Your Refrigerator to do Low Temperature Fermentations

The title of this blog is "How to Dedicate Your Refrigerator to do Low Temperature Fermentations". We definitely wanted to keep our must temperature at a constant temperature during fermentation to ensure that the volatile esters and yumminess that we tasted in our Chenin Blanc juice was retained throughout the fermentation. First, you need to have some good friends that have a spare freezer so that you can dump all your frozen goods in their freezer. My husband (ace online researcher) found that people converted their refrigerators into a temperature controlled fermentation space by procuring something like this Johnsons Temperature Controller A19AAT-2C.

The copper wire that you see to the right of the controller is the sensing element. My husband threaded the sensing element through the door of the refrigerator and placed it on the top rack of the frig. The sensing element can be set to a temperature any where within the specified range of 20-80 degrees Fahrenheit. The plug from your refrigerator is plugged into the plug for the Johnson Control and the sensing element will keep the refrigerator at the temperature that you specified on the controller. We have set our temperature for 60 ^oF.
Why is this important you might ask? Well, it is common knowledge that the conversion of sugar to alcohol gives off carbon dioxide, but may be not so known is that the conversion also gives off heat:

Once the fermentation is in the stationary phase and the yeast are rapidly converting sugars into alcohol, the heat generated needs to be controlled. We hope that the favorable surface to volume ratio of our kegs as well as the constant temperature that we are achieving in the refrigerator will help to keep our fermentation cool.