FermZilla Tri-Conical - Worlds most advanced PET Conical Unitank Fermenter is HERE!

[Music] hey guys keith from keglett and today we're talking about a new firmzilla tri-conical now if you're familiar with the firmzilla range and a lot of the firm zillas across the board are all pressurizable fermenters just like this uh they're clear so you can see what's going on inside them the other thing is uh with the conicals they've got a cone base and some type of butterfly valve at the bottom so you can dump all the stuff out of the cone and then you know rack off yeast for instance or take out take out hops that has settled out settled out of solution so they've been an awesome fermenter used all around the world by thousands and thousands of people and i think they're actually the world's highest selling fermenter to be honest with you now historically what we've had with the firmzilla um you know pressurizable fermenters is a base on the tank that looks like this and that's simply because it's all we could make like we have searched high and low for blow molding machinery manufacturers to manufacture this vessel for us but it's only up until recently that we've been able to do it and it's been due to a lot of r d and a huge amount of investment into the tooling which can make this new cone shape but previously what we had was just a hole that we had to cut in the base of the tanks and what we would then do is have to fit this type of assembly to seal it up so we would typically have a cone shaped seal which you drop in the top of the fermenter which has a rubber seal on the base like that now this drops in and then you would do a coupling nut from the underside like that and literally wedge to the body of the fermenter in between these two components then what we'll do is do up a uh the butterfly valve like that with a thread and away you go now certainly many people loved it this has been used you know all over the world and many people have made award-winning beers using this equipment however we did get a few complaints that some people would sometimes get this ring and they would jam it on firstly the second thing is some people would get this and sometimes jam that on in place and then thirdly some people would complain a little bit that you know every now and then they would get some hops in this that wouldn't travel all the way down the cone and go directly down the dump valve so you know that was a little bit frustrating because sometimes this little rubber lip here would just catch just enough hops and yeast on this ledge that it just wouldn't go down now granted it wasn't a large amount of hops and use we're talking about very small amounts here which you just sort of you know get to that sort of angle of repose on the side of the fermenter and just not quite go in there but you know it was one of those things that we wanted to fix so through a lot of r d and tooling as i was saying you know we came up with this new design and i can tell you it is revolutionary i think we're the only ones in the world with this new type of blow molding machine which essentially has a very complicate complicated uh blow cavity um so this new machine has enabled us to blow the body of the fermenter and it has a seamless transition from the cone down into a three-inch tri-clover ferrule that's right it's a large three-inch triangle over ferrule meaning that you know pretty much nothing is going to block that thing up we've used heaps of hops in there like half a kilo or that's like a pound of hops in the fermenter and it still travels straight down that doesn't get caught up on anything and it's just such a smooth transition straight into the base of the tank now it's called a tri-conical because it's all tri-clover fittings not just the tank itself but the other side of the butterfly fly valve where it connects into the collection container so have a look at how easy this is to take apart there's literally a two-inch tri-clover at the bottom here flick that open and then i've taken off that collection container if i need to take off this uh whole butterfly valve undo the three-inch tri-clover like that and the whole thing comes off like that so honestly it is so easy to take apart cleaning is a piece of cake if you're cleaning this out you can get our bucket blaster which is an automated cleaning method just tip this upside down it'll clean it out perfectly or if you uh just give it a good wipe with a sponge and a bit of sanitizer that'll do the job as well but because it's got this beautiful uh you know tri-clover feral base it's just so much easier so this is one of those videos i'm excited to get into the detail and tell you all about it so let's get straight to it now on the base of the fermzilla tri-conical the actual collection container or flex container as some people call it is exactly the same the container itself is made out of triton so this can be boiled and it's uh you know heat resistant it's also very chemically resistant quite strong and bpa free of course just like the entirety of the fermenter and on the ends of all the sides of this type of fermenter we've got the pco 1881 thread so as it comes as standard this this total assembly is all included however some of you guys might want to get some other accessories the carbonation cap really is a must it's a good idea to get a combination of some red and your red red and yellow ones we have got different ones just so you can distinguish which ones you want to use for liquid and gas generally speaking most of the guys in the office here use yellow for liquid and then we're using gray for gas just sort of easy to remember that way if we think of liquid gold and you know red for gas um but uh yeah these screw can screw onto this collection container now some of you guys might be thinking well why don't i just get the stainless steel ones a bit more expensive but they're stainless steel and yeah stainless steel is kind of cool and has its application but one of the nice things we've been able to do with these plastic ones is we've been able to make a wedge seal so it means that the seal under here is sort of molded onto the plastic so you never have an o-ring or washer to fall out of place you know or lose or wear out and you can just screw this directly onto the side of the flex container i should also mention that we have made some changes to this uh this flex container as well to make this lip stronger so notice previously some people would do this up and they could crack actually the edge of this pcr 1881 thread but now because we've made this made some changes here and made this stronger that is no longer a possibility the other thing i should say with stainless there is a washer in the stainless one so if you you're using one of the stainless carbonation caps and if you over tighten it the washer can actually sometimes fall out of place so it is kind of a negative but obviously having the seal molded in place it can't fall anywhere it's basically held captive in exactly the right position so i kind of prefer the plastic ones to be honest with you even though they're cheaper and even though we make less margin in them quite frankly so that's something you can screw on there now when you put the gas post on here it can be handy for a number of reasons firstly what i can do is i could use this to put oxygen into my fermenter and then it would bubble up all the way into the beer itself which is kind of handy or the other thing i can do is i can use it to purge the flex container so you know at the start of the fermentation process it's advantageous to have oxygen inside the the work because it kicks that you know yeast off to a really great start and it means that population of yeast is going to grow to a larger population so you know you're going to get that fermentation done however once you've been through that aerobic part of the fermentation cycle you really want to limit the amount of oxygen in the fermenter and that is one of the great benefits of using a pressurizable fermenter in general so what you can do for instance with this flex container is if i wanted to add hops into this flex container so let's say i wanted to drop some hops in here for instance like this so what i'll do is i'll get the hops into this collection container down here then what i could do is i could purge this with co2 and maybe crank the pressure up to round about three bar now obviously this butterfly valve would be closed like that when i'm doing this so i hit this with three bar worth of pressure or around about 35 psi and then what i do is unscrew this cap and let the gas out i could repeat that process two or three times and i'd be getting my oxygen level down below one percent so i'd be significantly reducing the oxygen inside those hops before i open this valve up like that and then let these hops travel up through the fermenter and infuse through the rest of the beer now another handy little accessory if you want to upgrade is this little device this is a pco 1881 thread to a ring pull pressure release valve now these pressure release valves all compatible with the top of the fermenter even your keg system however it's good to make sure that you've got the right color coded pressure release valve the red ones are our 35 psi or two and a half bar rated pressure release valve so if you screw these onto the collection container like this what you'll be able to do is instead of having to unscrew and screw up this you can put gas in here and then just simply pull the pressure release valve a few times to purge out the hops now that's one way to purge out hops it also can be used as a way to you know put yeast into the ferment you can actually put yeast in here open up the valve and then draw drop the actual work on top of the yeast and get that in there or of course if you've collected yeast like in this instance like i've already got a cider and this fermenter here and you can see how well that yeast has traveled down the cone it hasn't got stuck on that you know rubber cone seal that we used to have and it's gone right down through this large three-inch tri-clover opening into this two-inch tri-clover opening and down into this collection container so i could literally remove that i could put a two inch tri-clover end cap just on the top of that to keep the yeast sort of you know sealed from the environment and then when i went to come to ferment i could move that across to another fermenter attach that on there and open up this vessel here and drop that word or cider or whatever it is i'm fermenting on top of the yeast cake and it will just take off straight away so that's another cool thing you can do now to really appreciate how easy this is to take apart and clean i'm going to zoom in with the camera here and actually show you um you know how this works what we've got here on the base of the fermenter is a two inch triclova clamp so that comes off and the flex container comes off like that as i was saying a moment ago you can then put an end cap on there like so and then attach another tri-clover clamp to seal that up now i've got a sealed container and i could have for instance collect the yeast or something like that in there and save it for next time the other thing i've got is on the bottom of this vessel you can see we've got a butterfly valve now butterfly valves are the most sanitary form of valve they're way better than things like ball valves or other types of gate valves simply because there's no cavities for stuff to hide that's why we love using butterfly valves that's why we've always opted to use them on things like the the firm zilla so with this butterfly valve it's a little bit of an unusual butterfly valve in the sense that it goes from two inch to three inch and we found that to be the optimum combination because as you were drawing to a you know smaller and smaller orifice down through the cone the three-inch allowed you to really capture everything even when you're doing a huge amount of hops which you dry hopping in from the top like three four five hundred grams of hops in a in a dry hopping session for instance it would still be able to get through that large opening but then once it got down on the other side of the valve we could reduce that to a two inch and it would still fall into the container like this really well so that's why we've gone for this slightly unusually designed three inch to two inch valve so when you undo the valve it comes apart like that and you can see that the uh this whole triclo valve you can stick into the dishwasher if you really wanted to to wash it or in sanitizer it's made of glass reinforced polyketone so it's look really strong highly chemically resistant and you know it really will last you a lifetime the other thing is on the bottom of the fermenter you can see how we've made the base here as you can see we've got this singular piece of plastic which transitions from the cone inside and then into this uh this is triclobal ferrule now i should say also we give you a special type of triclova clamp which is a three inch triclovir clamp but it's a three piece and that is a must we did a lot of experimentation with this and we just felt that the three inch had more contact points where it was coming in contact with the neck of the pt fermenter body and it was necessary for us to get up to the right pressure rating so if you're someone who's got heaps of triclo clamps at home just make sure to always use the three piece clamp like this with the base of the fermezilla and not use things like the uh these types of two piece clamps they're the ones that look like this in literally two halves so that's a thing i wanted to point out now there is a tiny little fissure in in here now every single time i've used it i've had no problem cleaning that out and generally just rinse it with the squirt it out with the hose and everything comes out but some of you guys if you've got something stubborn which is dried up in there you might want to get a toothbrush and just scrub around here but as i said i haven't found it necessary i've found this absolutely a gem to clean and it's so much easier than every conical fermenter i've had in the past now as you can see we've got two different sizes of the fermezilla tri-conical we've got the 27 liter or 7 gallon we've also got the 55 liter or about 15 gallons so you know you're either doing a double batch or a single batch now on the top of the firm zilla they come included with this type of lead now this is a basic type of lid i suppose for people not doing you know pressure transfers and pressurizing the vessel however to really get the most out of a pressurizable fermenter and get all the benefits of oxygen-free transfers and really reducing the auction exposure to a lot of those really sensitive beers like lagers and nippers and stuff like that really you'd be crazy not to upgrade to the pressure kit so as standard you'll get that type of lid and you'll also get a a little you know conventional air lock so pretty much if you've started off in home brewing you know you see a lot of these types of things and that can just go into the lid so when you're fermenting you know away you go you fill that with a little bit of sanitizer and it'll get the job done however for a lot of people who are you know getting into more complex methods of brewing and really interested in brewing really fresh beers with very little auction exposure it's hard to beat honestly going with something like our little blow tie unit here so what will happen is if you put that on top of the fermenter like so you can make sure there's always a little bit of head pressure now you don't want enormous amounts of head pressure you know there is a lot of data and research out now to out there now to show that if you use too much pressure then it can actually have negative effects on the brewing process so really between about five or up to 15 psi max is the range where you really want to be in and you know 15 psi for carbonating but for most of the brewing process even like 2 or 3 or 5 psi is plenty one of the benefits of using pressure and using a pressurizable vessel is the fact that you can get some co2 absorb into solution so if you did have to take the lid off or do anything then it's going to be off gassing almost straight away and the other thing is you know if you happen to you know pour out a sample or go into another container or fill into another keg as soon as you go into that keg it's going to be off gassing as well creating a nice little co2 blanket and pushing out oxygen at the same time so that's enough about that but with the standard lid yeah you might want to use these black caps if you're just you know using a gravity system however most of you guys are probably going to want to upgrade to these types of carbonation caps so actually even though they're different colors they come out of exactly the same injection mold and when you're using pressurizable fermenters very soon you'll notice that is kind of handy especially with these types of fermenters to be able to use your gas and liquid post on both of them which is why we came out with these new colors so we've got a liquid which we generally use for sorry we've got a yellow which we generally use for liquid and we've got a red one which we generally use for gas so just think you know liquid gold i suppose so how i normally set these up is with this dip tube so it's got a floating dip tube with a mesh filter that's really nice to have a mesh filter i must say because you know if you're using a lot of hops in here you'll very quickly find the hops will go up the dip tube and get blocked in things like these poppets and stuff like that and it's incredibly frustrating halfway through a dry hopping run to then get hops all stuck through stuff so you know we've got this little uh cage i guess you might call it and then there's a float on it so the beautiful thing about this type of fermented design and this type of float system is this can sit always collecting the clearest beer at the top of the fermenter because generally what you'll notice is the yeast will start to you know settle out and let's say just wanted to rack off you know a few pints or have a drink out of the fermenter you could actually drink this first bit first or wrap that off into a keg even before the entirety of the fermenter has cleaned out it has cleared up so to connect this yeah what i would do is get this lid pull this off and then screw on the yellow carbonation cap like so and then the silicone dip tube would just push on to the base of that barb like that so look there's not really a need for a hose clamp under here because it's not under you know a significant amount of pressure it's really the only pressure difference between the bottom and the top of the tank you know being exerted on that joint the other thing i should say is when we send out these types of silicon dip tubes um these come longer than what you need so if you have too much uh silicon dip tube here you'll end up with this all sort of you know winding up in there and it actually fouls itself up so it's really important when you first get the silicon dip tube we make them really long so they can even fit our 60 liter all-rounder fermenter so that's the one that doesn't have any valve at all and that's the tallest one but if you've got any of the other fermenters you will have to chop this dip dude down to a shorter length so this one's already done as i said before so that goes on there like that and then what i'll do is get my red carbonation cap and screw that onto the other side like so and whack this on the top and secure it with this ring here so that makes for seriously an amazing fermenter you know because it's completely clear i can see what's going on i can see that yeast settling out and in many respects i prefer using this type of fermenter than even much more expensive stainless steel fermenters just because you can see everything that's going on and it really increases the speed at you learning the process and learning what's going on under the hood so a lot of you guys might want to upgrade from this standard lid to what we've got now which is our 2-inch tri-clover lid so this is the lid here which has a 2-inch tri-clover opening so what i could do is i could basically attach my my yellow carbonation cap here with the dip tube like that and the float you know just exactly the same as what i had on my previous lid then what i would do is attach this neck ring like that and put this on the ferment then what i can do is get my red carbonation cap screw that on the other input and just like my other lead i can put liquid out here and then you know i can attach a spunding valve or something like that onto the other post the nice thing about having a two-inch tri-clover opening on here is instead of having to remove the whole lid every single time what i can do is just uh you know take off this you know two inch uh end cap like that so i can undo the tri-clover clap remove that end cap and because i'm not i haven't got a huge opening here you know i'm not getting as much oxygen into the fermenter so i've just got a little small opening and that's really plenty to just pour in a bag of hops or pour in some yeast still a large opening is nice for when i want to you know wash the fermenter out and you know wipe the insides down and get that crown off there however you know for a lot of additions that is going to be perfectly you know fine and all you need the other thing i wanted to point out though is we've got another cool accessory called the hop on which is just in the process of coming into stock so the hop on looks like this and it literally looks a little bit like a bong which is why we call it a hot bong so if you're going to use the hop on what you'd want to do is basically use this in conjunction with our firm zilla two inch to two inch firmzilla butterfly gate valve so that's different to obviously the one on the base which is three inch to two inch so what i do is i attach that to the top of the fermenter like this with a try clover clamp like so and now i've got this butterfly valve which i can open and close like that and then i can put this hot bong on top like this now you're probably wondering why am i putting the hot bong on here and that's really because now i can make additions to my fermenter and purge the contents of whatever is in this hot bong of oxygen so i can whack that on top i can get this uh little clamp two inch tri-clover clamp on the top here and do that guy up now we did get lots of other customers you know make add-ons and accessories and stuff like that out of sight glasses so we've been selling more and more uh two-inch tri-clover side glasses but really they're not quite ideal they're not designed to be used as a hop addition device like this so we felt that it was necessary for us to injection mold a new product like this which is the hop bong and really with a gas port on the side and that's ideally facing down in a position like this so when i pour a bag of hops in here you can see what happens i've got this carbonation cap on here like that which i screw on and you can see what happens when i put the hops in there at the moment i've got like a hundred gram pack of hops in here so i'm going to drop that in you can see how much 100 grams goes up to here um so that's kind of feeling to you know just the base of the hop bong so this is the two inch hot bong as i said before but we've also got a one and a half inch hot bong so the one and a half inch hot bong obviously is a smaller diameter so it's not going to hold as much hops but let's get another 100 gram bag and drop that in as well so you can see now even with a couple of hundred grams of hops we still haven't even filled this bad boy up right to the top i could probably put another you know maybe 30 or 40 grams in there so um yeah that's the hot bong assembly and then the last thing i'd want to do is put a cap on this so you could use an end cap like this but that would be a little bit annoying because every time you try to purge this with gas you then have to undo this to then release the pressure but we've got another device which is our two inch tri-clover to pco1330 pcr 1881 so this is like a cone shaped little adapter here and then the other thing we've got is that same pco 1881 to the pressure release valve so this is my preferred option and if you screw that on top of the fermenter like this and then secure with a tri clover clamp again so once again that two inch tri-clover clamp on the top there and now i've got a really really handy assembly what i can do is hit this with the co2 purge that gas out of there by pulling this pressure release valve on top like this and then once i feel like i've got this sufficiently purged of gas all i have to do is open up this valve here and as you can see that pops with a few movements of the lever all drops down into the fermenter so that is the best solution honestly to get dry hops into the fermenter at the end of a fermentation well that's it guys hope you enjoy using the firmzilla tri-conical i think in the next few years this is definitely destined to become the world's top selling conical fermenter look i think it's got so many advantage advantages over stainless steel in the sense that you can see straight in and see what's going on you know it's pressurizable to a significant pressure where you can carbonate and force carbonate in this bad boy and really it's so easy to use and it's never been as easy to clean out we're also working on heaps of other accessories and if you want to hear about those accessories or anything else that's coming out definitely hit subscribe now bottom right hand corner hit subscribe and you'll hear about all the cool new gear as it gets released the other thing that would be really handy is if you share this video with your other friends if you've got a friend who's you know stuck using some old plastic container for a fermenter share this with them and show them how cool this fermenter is and how much you can do with it conical fermenters have never been easy to use and never been easier to clean out and never had so many cool accessories that you can buy with them lastly if you haven't already join our homebrew community group we've got a facebook homebrew community group with lots of people on there sharing tips and tricks of how to get the most out of the gear so sign up now and that's it for this video see you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: KegLand

Views: 58,761

Keywords: FermZilla, Tri Conical, tri-clover, tri-clamp, kegland, keg king, fermentasaurus, generation 3, conical fermenter, home brewing, home brew, home brewing beer, conical fermenter review

Id: dRA6fe3eEvA

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022