Tuesday, August 30, 2016

New Temperature Controlled Fermentation Chamber

Last year, my husband took our refrigerator and turned it into a dedicated temperature controlled fermentation chamber. Earlier this year, old faithful refrigerator-cum-fermentation-chamber bit the dust. What can I say, it was about 30 years old. We postponed getting a replacement but NOW is the time. My husband looked on line and found HomeBrewTalk.com where they had all the specifications for Sizing Your Corny Kegs for Fermentation.
After cluster counting and bagging our grapes, we feel that we will at least have twice as much juice as we had last year. (Last year, we had 70 pounds of grapes that yielded 5 gallons of juice). This presented a problem regarding what type of fermentation vessel we should invest in. There was no question about using stainless steel again, but the question was what size?
We already have two one-sixth barrels that can hold approximately 5 gallons each. We feel that we may have about 12 gallons of juice this year. We want to give enough head space for the fermenting must to allow for the initial foaming, so we went with two slim-quarters to hold our juice. Once we decided on the type of keg, the following layout plan from HomeBrewTalk helped us decide what kind of chest freezer would work to hold our kegs.
We got lucky. Even though all of this necessary equipment is being purchased at the eleventh hour, we were able to get the chest freezer on sale with delivery on Thursday, September 1st and our two one-quarter stainless steel Sanke kegs are arriving today.
References:
1. Barrel Sizes photo from: Wort-O-Matic.com.

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