@mongoose33 could you speak more to the spike conical and what it would take me to perform temp control on it. Currently I ferment in buckets in a chest freezer and have no idea what it will take to hold temps in a conical. I don’t have room for another upright freezer or refrigerator and I have no desire to recirculate ice water. I don’t want the hassle of freezing water bottles and changing them out to hold temps. What does it take to get set up with glycol? How clean of a setup is it? Is it something that must be mounted in a permanent location, or can it be stored away when not in use?
I bought a Spike CF10, which will do 5-gallon batches as well.
The Spike temp control system involves a stainless coil system that goes into the wort and is fed by icewater or glycol. The heat is supplied by a heat mat similar to a fermwrap or reptile mat, except it's cut to fit the lower conical part so it will warm half-batches as well.
It's not cheap. With the heater it's $375, but it's made to work w/ the conical.
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If you aren't going to use an upright refrigerator or freezer, and you don't want to recirculate ice water, about the only remaining option is glycol.
I just bought the Penguin Glycol Chiller, but before I did, I tried very hard to get a freezer-based glycol reservoir to work. It was sufficient to hold ferm temps and I could get things chilled down to the lower 40s, but that was about it. I tried a number of different ways to get it to crash all the way to 32--that's the temp I want for crashing--but I just couldn't get it there.
If you don't expect to crash lower than 40, I think you could do this in a freezer. I'll attach a couple pics below showing how I did it. There are others here who have converted window air conditioners to a glycol chiller, apparently with good effect. And one guy turned a cube freezer on its side, bent the compressor unit so it would remain upright, sealed the thing up, and apparently that works as well. So there are ways to get decent glycol chilling without breaking the bank, which the Penguin will tend to do. But they're DIY not turnkey solutions.
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So for starters, how cold do you want it to get? Second, what size? With the CF10 it's harder to chill a 5-gallon batch than a 10-gallon batch, oddly enough. Partly this is because there are all these appendages sticking out from the fermenter: three legs, two handles, a sampling port, a temperature well, a yeast dump/sight glass, the top where the coil inserts, and the CO2 manifold. These all act as reverse radiators, sucking heat into the fermenter. I got around that to some degree by wrapping the fermenter in a moving blanket, and there are other insulating things i could have done. The temp control kit comes with a neoprene sleeve, which is nice, but it's not sufficient in my experience to truly insulate the whole thing unless you're in a cool environment (say 70 degrees or less).
But even then, much of the heat load the chiller has to deal with is dependent on ambient temperatures. If you're in a place that's 80-90 degrees, my guess is almost no chiller can overcome and crash low unless you're working on insulating the fermenter. If it's your basement, quite possibly.
If crashing low is not an important goal for you then you probably can do this with the Spike kit and some system that will chill glycol for you. Others will only take their beer to 40 or so, then keg, and if you wanted to crash lower, crash the keg in a keezer or refrigerator or freezer. I want 32 degrees because I'm fermenting under pressure toward the end which partially carbonates the beer, and the colder the temp, the more of that CO2 the beer can absorb.
You have identified an important element of these conicals: if you can't control fermentation temperature, it'll be a very expensive piece of bling producing so-so beer.
I feel like this is a bit rambling, didn't intend it to be that way. Hopefully it gives you some food for thought. But the first step is figuring out how large, and how cold.
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I have two refrigerators as ferm chambers; I've always been struck by the simple elegance of the setup. It works, no futzing around, and that's that. If I could have found a way to roll my fermenter into an upright freezer or refrigerator, I likely would have. There are those who set them up inside such a chamber, but they can't be rolled out, and i want to roll my fermenter over to my sink for easy cleaning. Having it in a fridge or freezer obviates that.
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Here was my attempt; I already had the refrigerator/freezer unit, so the cost was the parts inside: glycol, tub, and some heat sink and copper tubing.
The tubing ran through the top of the freezer and out to the fermenter. I controlled the freezer using an Inkbird whose sensor that was also in the glycol reservoir. The pump is in that reservoir.
I did the copper tubing and heat sink in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the freezer chilling. They helped, but in the end, not enough.
