Up scaling fermentation

Hi, I have been home brewing for about 5 years and now the house is almost completely renovated the wife is evicting the brewing from the house. However she has let me build a 7m x 3m building in the garden, so obviously I'm planning on upscaling what I am doing. The only thing I can't decide is how to control my fermentation temperatures. I will initially have 4no 220l plastic conical tanks. They will be in a seperate room within the building which has 150mm of insulation board on all walls, ceiling and floor. Obviously purely controlling the room temperature won't work as the tanks will be at different stages of fermentation. I am only brewing ales so no need to get as low as lager Temps. So do I therfore keep the room heated and use some sort of glycol chiller to chill the tanks individually. Or use an aircon unit to keep the room very cold and then have individual heat to each tank? Which is the best way to go and can you recommend any products to do this? Thanks in advance for your help

Welcome to the forum

Unless you do stuff like ramp up the temp near the end of fermentation to make sure you get the extra FG points the fact the different brews are at different stages I dont think will make huge amount of difference.

If say you kept your brewing room at 18C, yes, inside the core of each FV there will be differences due to exothermic reaction from the yeast but overall it will be fine as you wont be exceeding recommended fermentation temps to create off flavours overall

I used to buy my ingredients from ubrew who specialise in renting out equipment and expertise to brewers without one or both and they have a room for the conicals to ferement in which I believe was temp conrolled but people were putting conicals in there at different times all the time so I believe just temp controling your brew room would work.

Again to give to another example I have a brew bag which is a very mini version of what your going to be doing. I just control the ambient temp in the bag, rather than monitor and control the temp in the FV. I find this works very well.

To go off plan from what your asking you could also just brew with the seasons. Your brew room seems like it will be well insulated to keep temp fluctuations to a minimum. You could also help this by also insualting each FV. Then just brew lagers in the winter and ales in the spring/autumn and belgian ales/saisons during the hottest part of summer. Or just use temp tolerat ale yeast like mauribrew 514 (which has a temp tolerance to 29C) during the warmer months

Thanks for your reply. Based on that I think I'll just start by temp controlling the room and see how that goes.
Thanks again

I think that would probably be easiest and cheapest. Those glycol jackets cost serious money

They do, however what I was thinking of doing was going down the route of butchering an air con unit to keep a vat of glycol cold then putting stainless steel immersion plates in each fermentation tank with a series of auto valves and pumps

Tbh, I have no idea what that means but it sounds cheaper than the jackets. My set up super simple. 1 FV that I free ferment (using temp tolerant yeasts during summer) and 1 FV in a Cool brewing brew bag which is just a giant picnic bag which uses ice bottles to keep the FV cool. Surprisingly effective though

83jmh said:

They do, however what I was thinking of doing was going down the route of butchering an air con unit to keep a vat of glycol cold then putting stainless steel immersion plates in each fermentation tank with a series of auto valves and pumps

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This sounds expensive. Unless you can fabricate yourself?

Cleanliness/sanitation would have to be top notch on the immersion plates, depending on how they are designed could make this difficult.

Also, you would have to be 100% confident in the fabrication of the immersion system. A leak resulting in glycol contamination would be bad news.

For those volumes chilling is much more important than heating as the fermentation creates heat, if you can insulate the vessels well heating would only be needed in winter. You don't need glycol unless you want to chill it below about 6C and a maxi chiller with the python pump connected to an immersion coil (like an immersion chiller inside the FVs) or jacket and controlled buy an STC 1000 or similar should do what you want. These guys do custom made cooling jackets http://www.inncellar.co.uk/index . Alternatively use a yeast with a large temperature range like nottingham and worry about temp control if you need to. I hope this makes sense as I can be bad at explaining things.