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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • If you want no electronics in the mix at all, insulation is about your only option. Since fermentation is an exothermic process, you’ll also want to make sure you can keep it from getting too hot. Your beer will taste a lot worse from the yeast getting too hot than it will from the yeast being too cool.

    You can buy inexpensive temperature controllers, and if you can do simple wiring, it’s not too hard to add a power outlet (and an enclosure). From there a fountain pump some tubing, a cooler full of water and either a heat source or a cold source can serve as a simple way to regulate your fermentor’s temperature.

    The heat source could be something like an aquarium heater or a sous vide heater and will sit in the cooler (always on, not run to the temperature controller). You’ll tape the temperature controller’s sensor against the outer wall of your fermentor (with some insulation taped over it. A paper towel folded a few times works fine), put the fountain pump in the bucket of water with the fermentor, and run the tubing into the cooler. The output of the tubing should be run back into the bucket.

    When the fermentor gets too cool, the temperature controller will kick the fountain pump on which will take the water from the bucket and run it through the hot water in the cooler and back into the bucket. This will slowly raise the temperature inside the fermentor - and slow is what you want with yeast.

    You can replace the heater with ice or frozen water bottles if you need it to cool your beer in the warmer months. I did this for a while before moving to using a chest freezer and reptile terrarium hear mats regulated by the same temperature controllers.







  • With the addition of the recent Groovy MiSTer core, this is probably the best bet if you want to play on a CRT screen since you’ll also get access to games / systems not available on the MiSTer.

    For those not in the know: Groovy MiSTer allows one to route the video and sound from an emulator on a regular PC through the MiSTer hooked up to a CRT. It is essentially replacing the need to use an old and modified GPU for analog video output.