Tour, Festivus, Refrigeration

Lots of exciting news since the last post! First of all, I toured Two Beers Brewery last month. I was intrigued by the size, the newness and the philosophy of the brewery, so I sent Joel, the brewmaster, an email asking if I could take a tour. He graciously offered me an invitation, and after a short visit we retired to the Woodland Park Pub for a pint a and a bite to eat. I learned quite a bit from him about starting up a commercial brewery.

On the 19th, we brewed a batch of Festivus. Logistically, everything went very well. We got our mash tun good and warm before doughing in, which was a great help in maintaining the target temperature for the duration of the mash on a cold winter day. Also hit initial wort target quantity right on, and ended up with almost exactly 10 gallons of brew to ferment. It has been conditioning for about 10 days now. We'll probably keg this weekend.

And finally, additional refrigeration is now a reality. For quite some time, I've been searching for the ideal way to get more keg refrigeration space. Eventually I decided the best way would be to buy a new energy-efficient half chest freezer for our frozen food and free up the ancient Coldspot chest freezer that we had been using. With the addition of a "brewing gadget", it's now ready for refrigerating beer.

The idea originally came up when I ran into Scott, a friend of mine since childhood, at the last Dark Star Orchestra concert at the Showbox. He told me about using a temperature controller that overrides a freezer thermostat by cutting off power to the unit when a predetermined temperature is reached.

We've never had that big old freezer more than about half full at most, so the idea of making better use of that space was appealing. We do need some freezer space for food, though, so that's where the half chest came it.

To convert the Coldspot to the Frankenfreezer, I purchase a Johnson Controls A419 temperature control:



This thing is just great! You can set the set point to anything from -30 to 212 degrees F, set the differential (difference between cut in and cut out) in 1-degree increments up to 30 degrees, set an anti-short cycle delay, and set it to operate in heating mode instead of cooling mode.

I had to build and wire up the power in and power out cables. Instead of building the cords from the ground up, I picked up a 15' workshop cord with nice molded plugs for on each end. Cut it in half, and there were my professional looking in and out cables.

Once the temperature controller was wired up, all I had to do was run the temperature sensor cable along the wall to a convenient place to drop it in to the freezer. The cable will run under the seal between the door and the body of the freezer, shouldn't allow for too much air leakage. If it does, I may try to build a little wedge to run it through to smooth out the gap.

Here's the finished setup, ready and waiting for some kegs:



Since the temperatures outside are near ideal beer serving temperature these days, I'm keeping the Coldspot powered down for now and taking advantage of Mother Nature's cooler, but in a month or so we'll be putting it to work.