***Edit: This blog was posted before the popularity of Kveik yeast. You can definitely brew quality beer at summer temperature using a kveik.
The Dude: "You can brew beer at your room temperature in summer, youtube said so."
Brew Guy: "At Room temperatures? In India? There goes youtube again."
Well, you can't. Unless your room temperature magically stays under 21°c all the time. Let's figure out why.
First off, please chill. Brewing a beer in Indian summer is still possible. Don't jump out of a window just yet, but read carefully. Beside Himalayan states J&K, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh and of course that southern beauty "Ooty" which seems to have long forgotten it's latitude, Indian summers are hot. The rest of us Indians, at least once in our lifetime, lying flat half naked, half dead under a ceiling fan, gasping for water, with eyes half closed; sometime hallucinate the devil poking us with a stick and going - "And you thought Hell was hotter?" No pun...
If your room has an A/C, it but, since you aren't going to (and shouldn't) run it 24x7 under 21°C anyway you may still struggle to maintain the ideal temperature. Let's not take that temperature display thingy on your AC's front panel seriously, it's only for cosmetic pleasure and doesn't display real figures.
Fermentation process is exothermic (heat producing). So, if your room temperature is 20°C, the temperature inside your brewing bucket can rise upto 22°C or even more. Also mind well, If some brewing yeast pack says that particular yeast strain can survive temperatures upto 30°C, that doesn't mean they will survive and produce a tasty clean beer too. Apparently over 25°C, many brewing yeast strains start hallucinating the devil too.
As a rule of thumb, try to keep your room temperature near the lower spectrum of what your style suggests for first 3 days of fermentation (15 days for lagers). Casually speaking, most ales are fermented between temperature ranges of 18°C to 23°C and lagers between 7°C to 13°C. Go figure the math now.
The Dude: "Ok... Can we cut to the chase now? Can we still make our beer and drink it too?"
Brew guy: "Build a Swamp Cooler... but do yourself a favor and build a Fermentation Fridge instead.
The Dude: "A what?"
Swamp Coolers
The Idea is to put your fermenter in a larger plastic tub filled with ice and water. Then, you make the bucket wear an old t-shirt with holes. It will stay wet and cold all the time, thanks to the capillary action. You feel kind of sorry for the bucket but at least you get a better beer. You should still keep the entire assembly in a cool dark room though and must change ice 2-3 times a day to keep the temperature in check. Sounds like too much elbow grease? It is, but it works. At least as far as your brewing esteem is licking floor and your have brewed just a few batches (mine made it to 40). I have seen several incarnations of the same concept in the past few decades but the core idea remains just the, well... as terrible.
The reason behind the puns is not because the idea is totally hopeless but because; ice melts faster in Indian summer and the frequent temperature fluctuations can affect your yeast's health and ultimately the quality of your beer a bit. But it's ok to do it when required.
Tips:
You can put a few drops of Bleach or Iodophor in the tub everyday, to keep the water from going stale over time.
Change those t-shirts every 2 days or they'll rot!
Cover the entire monstrosity with a few old blankets to further limit temperature loss (or gain here).
You can put a good old table fan facing the bucket to bring a couple more Celsius down.
A simple laundry tub Swamp
A Mash Tun turned into Swamp
A Dedicated Swamp
Ice cooler tubs are preferred now a days because they can hold temperatures longer than a regular tub. If you already have a Mash Tun you can employ that for the task without spending a single rupee. Just make sure to remove the filter mesh grills temporarily.
Now, regardless of what articles you read, there's no point investing more time and more money in swamp cooling than what we have covered so far since the core concept has it's limitations and you just can't bring about a miracle using gold plated parts.
That brings us to our next option.
Fermentation Fridge
Second hand fridges are not as expensive as they used to be 10 years ago. You can get a decent quality 230+ liter "working" fridge from OLX or a local scrap vendor for roughly Rs. 3000. That's good enough for our purpose. However, you can always invest in a chest freezer and put in three fermenters at a time if you are on a brewing frenzy. Second hand works again.
Now, throw in an external Temperature controller worth Rs. 1500 and you are almost set for life. You don't require an expensive two way "heat and cold" TC (Can we please call them Temperature controllers just TC?) since we don't need to attach a heating element unlike countries with colder climates. You also don't need to cannibalize your fridge in an order to bypass the internal fridge TC either (this you will find on many unnecessarily complicated youtube videos on the subject), for the same reason. You can connect your fridge's power supply directly into the TC now and connect the TC to your main switch board.
These TCs come with a built in temperature sensor/probe (a dangling long wire) that you hang inside the fridge from its door or tape it to the bucket's wall (keep the door closed when in use of course!). Now you can set two temperature ranges: to cut off or turn on the TC. For example when making an ale we may specify cut off at 18°C and turn on at 21°C. What that means is, it shuts the fridge when the temperature dips bellow 17°C and turns it back on again when it rises above 21°C. Next step: Transfer your bucket to the fridge and turn on the TC.
The guy in the video bellow quickly sums up the concept but ignore that heater attachment part. Also the TCs you'll get in India may not come with a built in two plug board. It's easy to make yourself though! Or just ask your electrician to make it for you.
An example of another apparatus
And another
CO2 is never a problem in refrigerators. In fact it's safer than many of the refrigerator gases used as refrigerants. Most soda, soft drinks and packaged foods are deliberately filled with CO2. You and me, plants and microbes, even food that slowly decays in your fridge emit CO2.
Hi Chinmay, thanks for this well-written article. One question on the modified refrigerator: Will the CO2 cause any issues inside the closed refrigerator? Probably the volume of such CO2 is far too small ...?