Only one way to find out!! Sadly I'm stuck with having to wait until temperatures come up a bit more. Low 40's seems to be the normal temperature anywhere I can stash it and none of the coolers I could find would work to insulate it. Oh well only a couple of more months before the yeast will be happy.
Was looking at the website of a homebrewing supply store (I need more fermenters) but saw something that might give you an idea. http://ebrew.com/product789.html BREWER'S HEATING PAD This unit provides ideal temperature for year round fermenting in cold conditions. Convenient and easy to use - just plug it in. Avoid direct contact with liquids. Use on a flat, solid heat resistance surface. DO NOT USE if it becomes damaged. BRU-BELT HEATING BELT http://ebrew.com/product673.html A heating belt used to keep the temperature of your brew up to proper temperature when fermenting in cooler temperatures. These belts normally produce about 20 watts and their position on the bucket or carboy determine the amount of heat is put into your brew. The lower the belt is on the fermenting vessel the more heat is absorbed. It will maintain 75 to 80 temperatures for beer or wine for up to 8 days. These cautions appear on the packaging of this product: DO NOT leave the belt plugged in for more than 8 consecutive days. DO NOT cover the belt with a blanket or any other covering. This could cause it to overheat. DO NOT store flammable objects near the belt while in use. DO NOT use the belt in a room temperature that rises above 75. DO NOT attempt to attach the belt to any container below the level of liquid in the container. Glass could break, plastic could melt, etc I'm not saying get those exact products. But it is an idea.
One of my ciders either fermented really fast or the seal was not that good. Maybe I'll try to sour it. No idea. I'm guessing the seal. Either between the bottle and stopper, the stopper and airlock or maybe just not enough water in the airlock. To keep oxygen out.
So I put some apple cherry cider (well juice) in the one I had that seemed to not ferment,pushed the airlock in the stopper more and I think it was the airlock not being down in the stopper enough that stopped the ferment. Also put more yeast in.
What the hell happened to the perry I was trying to make? It is all pear juice. Looks like motor oil. I wonder if I didn't clean the Mason jar as well as I thought I did and there is some blueberry or BlackBerry juice in there.
I saw this thermo meter power switch with two outlets - one for when the heat gets below X and another when it goes above Y, which you can set yourself. This allows you to set up a box that has styrofoam walls and in which you can place a number of carboys of brew. You'll also need a heating unit and a fan that blows outwards. Bonus points if you can place the heater so that it doesn't blow all it's heat to one carboy's shell while the carboy at the opposite end is frozen. I was going to build this whole brewing station this summer but I instead bought the new computer and this body armor and other gear for fencing. I figure I'll get around to brewing the next summer.
Well depending on how often computer is running and the rooms size/insulation the computer might work as a heater. My computer makes my room hot (also being in the southeast U.S. we do run the air conditioning in the winter).
Modern Finnish houses: during summer I sweat like a pig and in winter I freeze - yet autumn and spring are coldest because district heating doesn't heat the circulated heating water. Computers can be used to warm up various things but here the common issue is that the output heat is not very high because we don't want them to be running too hot. But you could totally warm up something like shower water with it.
And if the bags can't hold the water use some Jesus tape. Which is Finnish term for duct tape that comes from "even Jesus can't rip it off". I personally try to make the bags flat and make like a cooling array from them for efficiency. That said the bags lose cohesion when they warm up. Big boys use leather bags which are also great for mead and stuff.
I really like my mead. The 7 liter batch of finished product from February isn't quite matured yet and it was spoiled either due to lack of pasteurization or due to autolysis and possibly influenced by the weird pissy scented honey that it turned out to be like once really pouring it out - or the combination of all three. While it tastes bad it's a great drink. Most likely in the 10-14% range, it certainly feels as if it hits faster than my 14% liquor and it's certainly easy to drink despite the taste that makes the jaw muscles activate on their own. The second batch I pasteurized properly in low temp over couple of hours and chose a better honey and made sure to rack it as soon as the primary fermentation was done. It has a very pleasant smell and taste that somehow reminds me of fresh fruit even though there's only honey and yeast - and some raisins to feed the yeast. Possibly the raisins? In any case it tastes amazing and I think I'll need a third 10 liter bottle so I can have two batches constantly underway since the secondary fermentation takes a while - so I might easily get averaged out some 20+ liters of mead a year for starters. I don't even want any of the shop alcohols anymore, I just want my own stuff. I also suggested to wife that I remain unemployed and focus on just making a ton of mead for myself and given that I have no job I could just sit at home and drink it all day long and swing some swords every now and then. I think she'll need to consider that proposition for a bit longer. So yea the first one tastes bad but I like to drink it anyway. The second one I like even more than the one available at our local Alko.
So now I've tripled my capacity with two new 10l glass 'balloons', bringing total number to 4 and back to three after our middle one broke one. And as I explained in the offtopic thread, the algorithm of hydra means that any broken or lost balloons must be replaced by another two. This means my capacity is soon quadrupled. I'm also slowly learning more about practical stuff in making. I'm stupid as a boot but I'm getting there, slowly and through trial and error. For one I realized that when racking the contents of a balloon to get rid of the dead yeast it's difficult to get all the clearer stuff and to precisely avoid the yeast layer at the bottom and any stuff that clings to the surface. It's easy to get most of the clear stuff racked alright but if you want to make absolutely sure you don't get any crap with the clearer mead then you're going to be left with a ton of perfectly good mead that is just in too close proximity with the crap. This way I tended to lose more than a liter of the batch - until I realized I could take a narrow bottle and fill it with 80% of what was left in the balloon. There's going to be some so dirty crap at the bottom that there's just no sense to grab it all but it's acceptable that this extra bottle is filled with less than clear stuff because it's going to sit in the cold and have the crap fall to the bottom resulting in even clearer mead than in the main balloon still going through secondary fermentation. Now the liter of what would have been lost can be racked to the main body. That means an extra liter bottle of finished mead in the end for the same amount of ingredients for minimal effort. Potentially looking to bring the final produce to 8+ liters from 7 liters for the 10l vessel, who knows if even higher at some point. Also I realized my first batch was oxygenated by mistake during the secondary fermentation and also the primary fermentation temperature was too high. I'm going to at some point build a wooden crate to our upstairs balcony (glassed balcony) with a lot of styrofoam insulation. I'm installing an arduino to control a small heater unit and a ventilator unit to control the crate's temperature to sit at around 16C. There will also need to be an insulated portion at the end for holding very cold heatsinks so that when the day temperatures exceed 35C I can use the fan to cool down the main container and when it's -35C in winter I can have the heatsinks heated up so that the heater unit won't need to be ridiculously large. Small desktop and mobile application can be used to monitor the status of the system to see when the heatsinks need to be cooled or heated, which is quite minimal amount of effort of swapping a pair from the cooler to the container or using the gas grill to quickly warm the heatsink. Though with sufficient insulation a fairly low power heat resistor should be able to maintain the temperature - I just see powerful heat elements as a potential fire hazard.
I will soon have 5 of these, 10 liters each for a total of 40l of simultaneous brewing capacity. Balloon is what they're called here and it comes from the shape - they look like glass blower made some big balloons. I was told 10l is too big to manage and while it's heavy when full I find it quite manageable but at the same time if it were any larger than this then I'd want industrial steel options and some proper equipment in general. Even a 25l fermenter can be just enough for a single person's desires. For one I go a long way in avoiding buying any alcohol from the state monopoly where 0.7 liters of mead costs 25€ because I can now produce 8 liters of mead for ~28€. Also after a bottle of my second batch I have to say it tastes a lot better than many of the options that costs ~6x as much. I'm working up to get roughly 8l of produce from a 10l vessel by having multiple separation steps for getting most every drop I can salvage. By the time from starting a brew to bottling a single 10l vessel won't keep you happy for long. In fact with just one vessel and that capacity it will be a real test of discipline to get anything to actually mature for 1+ years, nevermind 2-3 years. Also a lot of people would like to have a sampler of what it tastes like, etc. With this latest upgrade to 40l brewing capacity I'm hoping to reach 'self sustainability' - truly able to get off of the state monopoly and alcohol taxes while also being able to just have a glass of mead with food and so, couple of bottles for the summer festival season etc. Now, if I actually could master a good recipe I wouldn't have anything against setting up a small shop but it's regulated to hell, the margins aren't great and all - and it would be difficult to scale up production if anyone liked it and vice versa if they didn't it would be quite a loss of money considering it costs a lot of money to satisfy all the alcohol safety regulations for commercial brewing. That said I'm not anywhere near there yet and I'm broke after being unemployed for a full year now. At the moment I just prefer to make my own stuff - and I personally think it tastes better because I've made it myself, others don't yet agree that it's better than what's sold at the shops but said that it's getting there. So for me right now it's the taste, having a project and saving a shit ton of money. Literally, 8 liters of this stuff for ~28€ or so, versus 160€ derived from comparing 15€ per 0.75l mead bottle cost at the shop. If there would be 60 liters per year of mead on average then that would be slightly over a 1l bottle per week. This means there would be nicely bottles left over to mature while also being perfectly able to just have a glass with the food or a couple on Saturday without my current stress of "oh shit I've only got 2 bottles left and neither of them is anywhere near year old or minimally aged!"
the hard to manage part they may have been talking about if you don't have the basket and just the glass by itself. I believe what people do is start 1 container going (1 gallon,10 liters whatever vessel size you are using) and once it finishes fermenting start a 2nd vessel so you always have something. also so so people can try different recipes. I currently have 2-3 1 gallon carboys (3.7 liters or so), a 1.5 gallon container with a spigot on the bottom and 4-6 half gallon jugs. I think what people upgrade to (mostly) from the 1 gallon is either the brew buckets or something like the plastic (not glass) big mouth bubbler (some are siphonless). Siphonless Big Mouth Bubbler® - 5 Gallon Plastic Fermenter with Harness just shy of 19 liters. the reason for siphonless (the spigot at the bottom) is to put it on a counter/table and use gravity to empty it either for aging or into bottles.
I wonder if I could accelerate separation by combining cold and a large enough centrifuge to make the mead clear faster. Due to ethanol's chemistry it will not separate from water mechanically, unlike the various particles and such which due to their very low mass to surface ratio take a very long time to fall to the bottom - suspension. Thus centrifugal force should increase the rate of this process. With free hanging racks the racks would simply assume the optimal angle on their own and a simple AC motor setup with a speed meter and PID controller could easily run such a setup. Just a thought.
