Fridge for Kegging and Fermenting

Greetings!

I recently purchased a refrigerator with a thermostat control that I intend on using to cool my carboys as well as my corny kegs. I'm wondering a couple of things...

1. if i need to set my fridge to a fermenting temperature of 65 (if its the middle of summer and the ambient temp in the house is too high)...is it going to be a problem if I have a keg in there at the same time? Normally I'd keep the kegs at a much lower temp...I'm just concerned about any adverse effects of raising the temp of the kegged beer for a few weeks.

2. The fridge sits in an uninsulated garage. During the winter months it can get to below 0 degrees. I'm curious if anybody has any feedback on how well a fridge would insulate against the cold. Has anyone hacked a fridge to both heat and cool?

I guess I'm trying to keep from having to ferment in different areas at different times of the year (and our house doesn't have any extra room for the fridge either)

Raising the temp to 65 wont hurt your kegged beer....it will just have more head and shoot out faster though.

Your beer will stale faster so drink it quicker. 

It will halve then halve again the life of the beer.  Assuming the beer is good for 120 days raising the temp from 32f to 65f will reduce reduce the quality life to 60 then 30 days.  Dr. Charles Bamforth as advises that for every 10C the staling rate doubles.  Assuming your are going from 32 to 65, that is just about 20C. 

Thanks so much for the feedback. I think I have a handle on what to do now.

Cheers!

Just an idea; you can maintain cooler temps in the fridge to preserve your kegged brew while fermenting at a higher temperature by placing a "Ferm-Wrap" or similar heating device around your carboy - a low-power flexible heated plastic sheet (may require another temperature controller...) - this will enable two set temperatures in the same chamber.

Temperature control is one of the biggies when improving your brew.

darvinlikemarvin said:

2. The fridge sits in an uninsulated garage. During the winter months it can get to below 0 degrees. I'm curious if anybody has any feedback on how well a fridge would insulate against the cold. Has anyone hacked a fridge to both heat and cool?

Click to expand...

I live in Norway and we have from time to time this type of challenges. What I've heard, is that normal kitchen type refrigerators start loosing their cooling capacity when exposed to temperatures in the lower temperature range:15C and lower but still above 0C. My personal experience is that the refrigerator I use in the basement of our house with temp. between 9C - 13C, never caused problems or gave signs of loss of capacity. In our summer cottage we have placed an extra refrigerator in an uninsulated part of the cottage. It functions well but starts to behave strange when exposed to temperatures under 7-8C (we are talking about Norwegian summers 8) ). I can't explain it, but temperatures in the refrigerator could vary much.
I know that there are special winter fridges available for recreation vehicles/camper vans as well as winter covers for more normal type of refrigerators. However I don't have experience with those.

Regards,
Slurk

Thanks for the insight! I think it's just going to take time and observation to determine how my fridge in my particular climate will react.

@philm63 - that's an interesting idea...hopefully the FermWrap would have a strong enough heating element to withstand the colder temps in the fridge

  A little late to catch this train, but I can tell you that I was fermenting and chilling in the same fridge with great temp control and no negative impact on beer.
  Simple answer, Refelctix insulation capsule for bucket or carboy, fermwrap with a Ranco  controller. Easily 80F in the capsule while 42F in the fridge.
  I have a second frige now and use this method to age and ferment at the same time!