German Brewing

Sold. Just bought a pair for my freezers. Between those and my spunding valves, I am going to have to get a job.

what are you fermenting in (conicals, kegs, carboys, etc)?

I have 2 SS Brewtech 1/2 barrel Chronicals, a 14 gallon MoreBeer Ultimate and tons of buckets/carboys for the smaller batch and meads. the Ultimate really one works for ales in the Texas heat. The Chronicals are in upright freezers for tighter ferm controls.

Oh yeah, that's right...you're in Austin. Man, you get no relief. Well, maybe a few weeks in the winter. I spend a few days a month in Houston, which must be rough for brewers. In the Northeast in PA we have good lager winters and can forego the freezers for a few months.

mcrispen, what's the expected ETA on your BrewPi's? I'm thinking I might go that route and buy the pre-assembled ones. I like the idea of having the built-in displays. I'm not sure whether to make a 2-chamber combo in one box, or use two separate boxes and make individual ones. My current plan is to use them in the same place (lagering freezer), but that could change down the road so the flexibility of having two (well three since I already have one) standalone units would be nice.

The BrewPi's arrived, but without sensors. Those are incoming soon. I also bought a Raspberry Pi to work up a more connected system. So will see. I also added on the Spark wireless to the BrewPi - now I have to figure out if I can do this by just powering on and off the freezers - I don't want to mod them until they are out of warranty.

I have been following the BrewPi development and waiting for multiple fermentation control.

I have two stand up Coke fridges and Conicals and currently use the aquarium controllers flashed for ramping profiles. They work well, but would love the graphing and user interface of BrewPi as well as the tighter algorithm.

That is good news then. Will have to hit Lowes when the probes get here.