My brother and I bought a Blichmann Fermenator conical early on in our homebrewing career, and although it has made a 100 gallons or so of beer, it has been out of commission recently. When we lived in Denver the basement of the house got cold enough that I was able to control the fermentation temperature just by heating the conical. (Un)Fortunately here in Southern California my garage doesn't get that cold, so I haven't had the ability to temperature control the thing. Temperature control is the most important factor of fermentation to prevent off flavors in the finished beer, so I have been fighting a battle to keep beers at the right temp without a proper fermentation chamber.
Introduce my christmas present for myself, a large upright freezer.
It is going to take some modification of both freezer and conical to get it to fit properly inside. I am also going to have to break down and buy a pump for my system, as that will be the only way to get the beer up into the conical. I have to wait for some additional fund to come in to finish, so the conical is going to sit idle for a little while longer, but in the meantime I am going to use the freezer anyway.
The first step in creating more space inside was to remove the plastic door shelves. As you can see in the above picture there was a good bit of moisture behind that panel. A trip to home depot later and a broken circle saw and I had a new flat plastic panel screwed in place.
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| New panel, made from a sheet of FRP from home depot. Cost ~$35 |
Luckily I had an extra Ranco ETC sitting around, hooked it up and drilled a hole in the side of the freezer for the temperature probe to come through.
Now I need to put it to use!
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