Selecting a Fermenter

This is a straight-up opinion question and I will give you my thoughts sans specific type or brand. And as a reminder to seasoned readers and news to newer readers, 20 years of my professional career was with a custom, stainless steel equipment company where I saw some pretty interesting brewing equipment.

My first thought on this topic is for the brewer to define what they want or need with a fermenter. When brewing at home, I like to ferment in one vessel then age and carbonate in a separate vessel. This method is well-suited for plastic. These vessels are relatively lightweight, they do not break, and make for handy fermenters. And as a bonus, clear options allow the brewer to see what’s going on in the fermenter. The primary downside to plastic containers is oxygen migration.

As long as you are not aging your beer for prolonged periods in plastic, the risk of oxidation can definitely be mitigated by racking into another vessel shortly before or after fermentation is complete. Old-school brewers like us cut our teeth reading about primary and secondary fermenters. The current trend is to do everything in a single vessel, but old-school secondary vessels do have their benefits. And one of the biggies is allowing for the use of a simple primary vessel and a simple secondary vessel. At home, the handy secondary is usually a keg because beer can be aged, conditioned, clarified, and served from a single tank. Brewers with the right sort of space can open-ferment in something as simple as a bucket and rack into a keg.

But since you’re not interested in buckets there are lots of alternatives in the world of plastic fermenters these days. If I were looking at this myself, I would select a fermenter with an over-sized outlet valve at the bottom to allow for the removal of trub and yeast sediment, a lid on the top for easy access, and racking port for when it’s time to move the beer into a secondary.

Another option these days is to do what most commercial breweries do, and that’s buy a stainless steel vessel that can be used for both fermentation and all of the things that can be done in a pressurized secondary vessel. These little cuties have a long list of benefits. For starters, stainless steel is just plain cool stuff. Stainless tanks are tough, keep oxygen and light out, and can be customized to the hilt by adding special nozzles (that’s what tank-folk call the bits and bats welded to the vessel), thermal wells for thermometers, cooling jackets, insulation, and whatever else one wants to add.

With all of this comes a few downsides. For starters, a tricked out stainless fermenter is much heavier than your glass carboy. That may not be a problem if you put it on wheels or bring your wort to the tank. Another challenge is discovered when one does a cost per volume calculation, because this number keeps falling and falling as tank size increases. This fact drives brewers towards larger vessels and larger is not always better if the goal is to have fun brewing lots of different types of beer because pretty soon a brewer simply has too much of a single beer. Large or small, stainless fermenters are usually heavier than glass carboys and cannot be simply hefted into a refrigerated fermentation chamber. But these tanks can be equipped with cooling jackets and simply connected to a glycol system and controlled by picking up a thermocouple or RTD (resistance thermometer detector) to connect to a temperature controller and glycol solenoid valve to maintain the perfect temperature. But those years in the stainless world tell me this is quickly becoming expensive.

Whether you are going to plastic or stainless, consider how your new fermenter will be cleaned. Clean-in-place (CIP) equipment can be super handy, but cleaning a tank with a CIP spray ball is not always as simple as pumping cleaner through the ball, rinsing, sanitizing, and filling. While some tank nozzles, such as those on the top of a tank, are cleaned during CIP, nozzles on the side and bottom cone of tanks usually need to be cleaned by hand because they are not properly cleaned with the tank CIP cycle. Some gasket types on lids and nozzles and the doodads connected to the nozzles should also be removed, cleaned by hand, and re-assembled after cleaning.

The truth is that fancy fermenters can be a pain in the neck to clean. My preference is to minimize the number of tank nozzles to keep things as simple as possible. Speaking of nozzles, avoid pipe thread connections and industrial-type stainless steel ball valves for cold wort or beer applications because neither of these designs are hygienic (stainless is called out because material construction is only one part of hygienic design; cleanability is another).

At the risk of starting a serious chapter on fermenter design and use, I am going to ask myself a question: “What’s the advice you want to give Ken?” The first has to do with getting the post-boil wort into the fermenter. Instead of bringing my fermenter to the kettle, why not take the wort to the fermenter like all commercial breweries do things. A 25-foot (7.6-m) section of beer line makes for a great transfer line, since I brew outside and ferment in my basement. Simply affix a beer nut fitting and a shut-off valves on the end. No pump required because gravity never takes a day off.

For fermenter cooling control, either position the empty fermenter into a refrigerated space before filling or rely upon the coolness of the basement and yeast strain selection to deal with what you have. The ultimate dream includes temperature controlled “closets” that are cooled with window-mount air conditioners and controlled with something like a CoolBot. Instead of using a glycol chiller, cooling jackets, controllers, and all of the stuff that comes with this sort of installation, my advice includes stainless tanks on wheels or carboys on carts that are simply rolled from fermentation into cold storage. Old-school lager cellar meets homebrewing. Oh, and this dream basement set-up includes a simple overhead crane system to help with the heavy lifting.

Questions without definitive answers are fun because they allow one to explore ideas and construct new solutions. The best advice I can offer is to ask yourself what you want to do with your brewing tools, then go out and buy, build, or re-purpose equipment to meet your brewing needs. The opposite approach is to buy something that someone else designed for things that you may not need to do. I mentioned working for a custom stainless company for a reason; stainless steel process equipment is really cool stuff, but it can become very expensive in a flash. It also can require much in the way of support equipment that can turn the homebrewing hobby into a brewery engineering hobby.

Response by Ashton Lewis.