Thursday, September 2, 2010

How much ready-to-drink homebrew do you have?

The Mad Fermentationist's CellarNone - 4%
Less than 5 gallons - 22%
5 to 10 gallons - 28%
10 to 20 gallons - 24%
20 to 40 gallons - 16%
40 to 80 gallons - 2%
More than 80 gallons - 1%

Sounds like most of you have plenty of beer on hand.  I think I have somewhere around 50 gallons of carbonated beer. My issue is that I brew a lot more than I can (want to that is) consume, so I've been trying to get better at bringing more beer when I go to a homebrewing meeting or over a friend's house for dinner.  However, despite my best efforts I'm still pretty protective of my favorite batches.

Luckily the basement gives me the space to hold onto a huge volume of beer without taking up all the closet space in my house.  My cellar room (which also has my aging sours) had some water damage when I first moved in, but some new gutters and a bit of regrading fixed the source and my father and I managed to rip up the damaged floor.  This summer saw temperatures down there climb into the high 70s, so next year I'm considering getting a small A/C unit to hold the temperature in the mid to low 60s (at the moment the window just has an empty grain sack over it to keep the light out).

If anyone else has any other ingenious home cellar solutions I'd like to hear them.

5 comments:

miltonics said...

You should look into root cellars.

Anonymous said...

1. Enclose a smaller space, and just cool that.

2. Buy a used Tru 3-door glass cooler from a restaurant supply house. Then you can see all of your beer in its glory! Use a Johnson controller if the temp control won't go high enough.

3. Go whole-hog and just insulate, enclose and cool the entire room. Why not?

Dank brewer said...

I have a small cedar sauna in my basement. We never use it as an actual sauna so I've turned it into my cellar. It holds a more constant temperature then the rest of my house and basement. I've been considering adding some type of temp control but for now it gets the job done.

Unknown said...

My beer room has its own AC unit. It definitely helps if you can swing it. As for keeping the sun out, I find plain old aluminum foil taped to the windows does a perfect job of keeping the sun out and keeping the temperature down.

The Mad Fermentationist (Mike) said...

Probably doing something similar next spring, its a small corner basement room with 1 tiny window so it shouldn't take much energy to cool.