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Just not cold enough...
I'd really like a good recipe for a nice german ale that is simmilar to a german lager. My Pa-in-Law likes German Lagers, but my crawl space doesn't get cold enough to ferment a lager. Any suggestions????
Hap.
Only thing that you could really do that works well is use a refrigerator. I usually have a lager in my kegerator when I don't have any kegs in it. I also have a spare refrigerator in my garage that i use. Makes it nice for doing lagers in the summer time. sorry I don't have any other suggestions. I know that I have seen a post about this on here or it might have been on beer advocate. If I come across it again I will post a link.
Found that link, they give some good ideas here:
http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/913795
I could have my mother-in-law touch your fermenter...that would keep it at lagering temps for months....short of that, or a spare fridge, no ideas....
An idea I've read about, but never tried, is put your fermenters into some sort of tub with ice and water, then blow a fan across it. I don't mean full of ice, just a little.
Short of that, you really need a fridge.
Yea, without naturally having a spot in your house with low lager like fermentation temps, you need to either have a fridge or something like a big cooler. If you have a big cooler you can put the bucket/carboy inside and use frozen water bottles to control the temps. Everything I've seen says it's a pretty effective way to control your temps.
DT
I wanted to brew a pilsner so bad that I didn't think on how I was going to lager it. I thought i'd get a small fridge, but all of the ones for sale now can't hold a 61/2 gallon fermenter with the air lock on it. One of my friends had a perfect one, fridge only, no little freezer on the top, but it was larger than a dorm fridge with the condenser on the outside, not on the inside taking up half the useable room in the fridge, I told him I'd buy it from him, and he told me to get bent. I didn't want to get a full size fridge,( i'm trying to acquire equipment a little bit at a time, so the wife doesn't get pissed.).
So there I was, my pilsner was in the secondary and waiting to get lagered, and I didn't have a way to do it. I came upon an idea, I have a washroom sink in the basement that I use for bottling, it's a real deep sink, it comes almost to the top of a 61/2 gallon plastic bucket that i'd be using. So I figured that i'd pack it in snow, after all it's New England, and snow is all over the place right? Again the beer gods where against me, as we are having one of the warmest winters in a while, it doesn't even get to freezing at night. So I filled the sink with water, it came out of the tap at 40F. I now rotate 8 frozen 2 liter bottles about every 2 days, I have a floating thermometer in the sink, and it's steady at 38F. I hope it gets to freezing outside soon, my freezer is getting a work out.
I never realized that the way i'm doing it is actually a tried method, and i'm glad i checked the archives before i started a new thread.
Yes, your sink cooler could also be called a swamp cooler....but hey, whatever works to get the temps down.....
ahhh, Ok, I had heard swamp cooler mentioned before on one of the other threads for lagering. When I googled swamp cooler, it came up with everthing but what it actually is. I'm pretty lucky, my cellar is about 50F all year, so it's not that hard keeping the temp. I'll make sure to be on the lookout for a small fridge though, makes it alot easier.
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