Good morning everyone. Just thought I would report on something I noticed with my conical fermentor. I have an insulated conical, that has a peltier heating system, home made, but essentially similar to what the MoreBeer ultimate conicals have. Yesterday I chilled the wort to 59 while transferring to the conical, but I was using Thames Valley yeast, which ferments best at 59 to 72. As such, I wanted to heat the wort to 62 to start fermenting. So I turned on the heating system. After about 2 hours I came back. The temperature had changed only a little, but I felt the metal lid, and it was hot. I gave the fermentor a stir, and the temperature read 84! There was massively more temperature stratification than I would ever expect. I would have thought that there would be currents in the fermentor that would even out the temperatures, but it does not appear that such currents exist, or if they do, only very minimally.
So I let it cool and pitch at 64. As I have found the chillers work much better at holding temperature than changing it, I went ahead and turned on temperature control and went to bed. Woke up this morning to beer nicely in the 64 degree range, right where it should be. But then I decided to toss in a Tilt digital hydrometer so i could keep track of the gravity. It read 83 degrees! I pulled the temperature probe up from the bottom of the thermowell so it sat at the upper layer of the fermentor it read over 78, as well! Again, there is significant vertical temperature stratification in the conical.
Has anyone else noticed this? It appears to be a thin layer of very hot wort, right at the top, and the rest of the wort seems to be held at the appropriate temperature. IS this something to worry about, as only about 5% of the wort is at this elevated temperature? Does the same thing happen with browbeats? What about with jacketed conicals?
So I let it cool and pitch at 64. As I have found the chillers work much better at holding temperature than changing it, I went ahead and turned on temperature control and went to bed. Woke up this morning to beer nicely in the 64 degree range, right where it should be. But then I decided to toss in a Tilt digital hydrometer so i could keep track of the gravity. It read 83 degrees! I pulled the temperature probe up from the bottom of the thermowell so it sat at the upper layer of the fermentor it read over 78, as well! Again, there is significant vertical temperature stratification in the conical.
Has anyone else noticed this? It appears to be a thin layer of very hot wort, right at the top, and the rest of the wort seems to be held at the appropriate temperature. IS this something to worry about, as only about 5% of the wort is at this elevated temperature? Does the same thing happen with browbeats? What about with jacketed conicals?