Spike Conical Unitank Fermenter Walkthrough

hey guys this is Adam from engineering here at Spike this is Brian I mean sorry Ryan I kind of you know forget what the hair and everything but uh we're here to talk about uh do another engineering download on one of our Premiere products this time the conical fermenter line let's get into it [Music] let's talk about it being a unit tank so you take means that you can ferment and carbonate in this thing all in the same vessel so you don't have to deal with you know bottling uh adding some priming sugar waiting seven days in order for your like your beer to carbonate you can do it all in this tank which is a real good benefit and it has this nice comb bottom that allows you to collect and repitch yeast that you know yeast is probably one of the most expensive things in a batch beer and can save you money down the road let all that stuff settle down and you know honestly having to jump from if you use plastic carboys or glass plastic buckets or glass carboys you got to jump from those to the bottle and you know you can do pretty much everything in this vessel from start to finish and you know and honestly saves you time and space yeah and speaking of glass car boys and plastic buckets let's get into the material this thing yeah so obviously you can see this is uh you know kind of mirror polished stainless steel look at that you know 304 stainless steel it's just an industry standard and again we've kind of learned over the years you go with what the industry has used and learned from and this is no different here so three or four stainless it's tried and true it looks good it doesn't Harbor bacteria it doesn't scratch easily you know you can clean it so easily by just kind of wiping it down that's why we got that mirror mirror polish on it you know and it pretty much is going to last a lifetime you know your first batch and your 100th batch the vessel is going to look the same you really can't stay the same for anything glass which obviously can break plastic can get all nasty and scratches and start harboring bacteria very easily so you know you're going to end up buying those vessels over and over again whereas this thing you pretty much buy once cry ones yeah and that's why we say your liver is going to fail before your equipment does exactly so let's talk about the fittings as you can see we got a bunch of holes in the front of it here obviously those are for different functions but you know what kind of fitting do we use we use a one and a half inch tri-clamp pretty much across the board you know we weld these in our facility um right here right here Sanitary Welding TIG practices uh very high level of craftsmanship you know you can look at these welds and you know show them off to your friends they clean up like you know perfectly this is pretty much a tried and true method again from you know the commercial Brewing industry we don't mess around with punching holes and using weldless fittings or threaded yeah threaded MPT fittings which get crud into the into the threads you know this is pretty much what you should do for for home brewing because it's 100 easy to to seal this up it never leaks it's going to last forever it's going to be sanitary and it's going to be easy to clean yeah and speaking of fittings let's talk about half batch so these conicals are made to do a half batch so this cf10 you could do a five six gallon batching as well the ports are low enough that you can access everything that's inside the temp coil which is a sweet accessory that you should definitely get we'll be able to reach a half gallon volume so you can chill it do you know crash it but also there's a heating pad that will go just on the cone so you can heat your beer and do a diacyl rest at the end of fermentation or something like that yeah and speaking of the heating pad that's just one of one of many accessories that we've got to kind of outfit this this vessel and we're going to talk about them next uh let's talk first about kind of a simple one here but leveling feet you know obviously these a lot of times people put their Brewing stuff in basements and garages it might be like uneven floors concrete cracks and stuff and it's really important to have a stable surface for your you know your fermentation vessel especially once you start to fill it up and so the bottom of the legs are threaded and it comes with leveling feet so obviously you can kind of set that up so that you got good contact on the round let's talk about the dump ports you can see here we have kind of a big oversized two inch dump Port so you know why did we design around that you know when some of the commercial vessels out there have actually smaller ports a one and a half inch Port the other nice thing about that is you can put a nice two inch sight glass on it and when it actually comes time to dump your yeast which you want to harvest a lot of times you can do that in sight glass or you can put a two inch Quick Connect valve or a quick connect fitting with a hose and put that into into a container just makes it a very smooth experience to definitely to do with that two inch cyclist don't forget you gotta get the light extension too so traveling on this adventure due north we're going to talk about this rack and Port so what is racking great question glad you asked so racking is basically transferring your beer from the fermenter to a keg or bottles it's that easy it's just racking it over also another cool thing about the sport you can add a racking arm as an accessory to make that process just a little bit easier which we'll talk about in a little bit good point so as we continue moving on let's talk about the most fun Port the sample port yeah sample valve tasty it's a nice couple quick turns you can take some gravity readings to know when your beer is done for mounting or tasty samples you can get some tasty samples I mean I have a lot of beer left by the time you're done yeah don't let your friends and family know that you got some good beer and information because they will be [Applause] so next we're gonna move up to the temperature Port so the temperature Port is an analog thermometer that allows you to know the temperature of the beer that's inside your fermenter real simple but it's a very very important step knowing your fermentation temperatures it allows you to have good fermentation good repeatability and kind of no one need to crash or warm things up a little bit yep and then in the center we've got a four inch Port that four inch pork can be used for really one of two different things one you could put a clear cap on it that allows you to kind of get in there and see what's going on visually kind of like you would with like a clear Carboy or you could put our temperature coil which has a four inch pour on it and that drops down into it so if you've got the tc100 kit which we'll talk about in a little bit that installs in the middle and that's what you can use to kind of cold crash and keep temperature low on your you know fermentation vessel when you're carving and getting ready to transfer so you can make those nice crispy lagers all right now that we've talked about the tank let's talk about the numerous accessories that we have to be able to trick this bad boy out let's start from the battle starting out with our Caster kit our casters they roll smoothly they're black they look good they have stainless steel hardware and this is obviously to be able to kind of be mobile With Your Vessel you know it can be a really nice convenience in a brewery garage wherever you have it one big thing about this is definitely highly recommend that when you install casters on these you include it with the extended bracing shelf as you can see here it's made of stainless steel plates very strong this just really helps stabilize those legs on the tank especially when you've got casters on it one of the things about it is it kind of spaces those casters out farther so that you got a better center of gravity especially once you fill it up with beer gets heavy you want to make sure it's stable um moving along with that one of the other things that you can do to kind of make this setup more convenient is you can include one of two different leg extension kits as you can see we have a short and along the short is Nine Inch the long is 18 inches and if you want to put you know a sight glass for yeast dumping or you know any other setup and you just want to bring that up higher off the floor you don't want to bend down whatever it is this is the kit that you're going to use and it threads right in matches the same legs you can put the leveling feet or the casters into the bottom of them makes it really easy yeah let's face it we're not getting any younger so having that conical head a little bit higher off the ground it it helps yep so let's move on to some of the other features as we kind of move up uh up here on the vessel this thing has a new neoprene jacket that is has her beautiful logo right there it might be a little bit biased though probably red and black yeah so this is all a big part of our tc100 Heating and Cooling kit uh what we have here moving on from the jacket obviously it's important to insulate whether you're hot or cold it includes a thermal well this is the temperature feedback pretty much yep which would go at this port so you remove this analog thermometer and put in your thermal well into that Port yep and then that's going to plug into your temperature controller which we have prepped up real nicely here and as you can see you can pretty much set your temperature up down to whatever you're looking for whether it's hot or cold and this is going to control it to those temperatures basically sudden forget it yeah so you've got a cooling side and a heating side so on the cooling side there's a few parts that come along with that what you can see here is our coil this coil we talked about earlier goes right through the top center Port of the lid and you're going to connect this with these fittings and hose right onto the ends there and you're going to connect that into your glycol Chiller which is sold separately and that's going to run the glycol through this coil and the coil comes in contact with your beer it keeps it cold to whatever you set it on this controller on the heating side it's a kind of a similar thing you've got a matte heater that's velcros inside the neoprene sleeve here and that also plugs into your controller and that can gently warm your beer up to whatever you set it to so pretty much with these accessories you can control it to within one degree of whatever you want to be able to kind of hit all your high points for the fermentation cycle hit those target times let's talk about kind of just going through the steps from A to Z first thing you want to do is oxygenate your wart as you bring it into the fermenter so first thing we do is we attach our carb stone that has a centered metal stone that flows the gas through it and as Ryan's connecting here you can see it goes onto the racking port and then this oxygenation kit which connects to your tank is going to flow the oxygen and if that is for your yeast we got some pretty cool videos with white labs who are yeast experts very good taught us a lot of stuff we didn't know but kind of the main gist of that is Happy East happy beer right that's the gist of it yep then next thing you got to do after your fermentation is done you want to start to cold crash you want to let that sediment settle out in order to do that safely you need to have a little bit of pressure in your tank that's what this is for this is the all-in-one prv this is going to allow you to set whatever pressure you want 0 to 15 psi and let you safely cold crash as you kind of get ready to go to the next step which is carb right yep and so carbon was pretty important part it's going to allow you to get the nice crisp Taste of a carbonation of beer so for that all you're going to do is connect again through your carb Stone you're going to add it in your CO2 to whatever volume that you want and this is going to help you get up to that 15 psi 14 PSI safely yep and then after that just for transferring your beer out you got to have a little bit of pressure so the nice thing about this all in one prv it's got a not only a post for the or a hole for the gauge but we also got a gas Post in it as well so you can kind of put your pressure in at the top kind of help push that beer out yeah and you can definitely check out one of our other videos on the prv the oxygenation kit we got a ton of good resources out there yep yeah definitely when you're looking at a unit tank like this you can use each of these individually but then kind of put cohesively together these accessories really maximize what a uni tank is going to do for you to be able to go through all those steps to get to you know nice kegged beer yeah just trying to take the pressure off of you guys well to wrap this video up we got a couple more accessories that we want to talk about so first we'll talk about the Side Glass um it's a great design uh it looks great a lot less Parts a lot less Parts yep it's a good way to see wart transplant from one vessel to another you can collect yeast and then and in your cockle and you know what I think it looks really good so good that someone got a tattoo of it shout out to that guy that's commitment Lots next we've got this which is a racking iron I think it's one of our most popular accessories it's got an indicator on it you can kind of swivel it without leaking this allows you to kind of swivel this kind of hit your your yeast bed and just kind of pop it back up so that you get to that clear beer area and then you know you can pretty much rack that beer out through this and it just makes it an easier process and then finally we have our CIP ball this really helps with cleaning we all know cleaning sucks takes up a lot of time that's one of the nice things about uni tank you can just pretty much put this in through the top you run your cleaner through it it spins and sprays that cleaner all Down the Walls and makes it far easier and much less time consuming to be able to clean your fermenter and get it ready for the next batch yeah and then you can go do other things while it sits and cleans yeah set and forget it all right well we've covered a lot of ground you've been able to see about our fermenter line all the accessories that go with it how it makes your life a hell of a lot easier when you're fermenting your beer and I think uh it's pretty good that looks pretty good video yeah hopefully finding for informative and if you have any more questions reach out to our customer service team they'd be happy to help and yeah see you next time peace

Channel: Spike Brewing

Views: 5,585

Keywords: Spike conical, conical fermenter, best conical fermenter, how to assemble conical fermenter, how to use conical fermenter, ss brewtech, blichmann, chronical fermenter, Blichmann Fermenator G4, Blichmann G4, brewbuilt fermenter, BREWBUILT X1 UNI, grainfather, grainfather fermenter, ss brewtech unitank, Anvil Crucible, spike unitank, spike fermenter, spike conical unitank, how to assemble spike conical fermenter unitank, unitank fermenter

Id: V5uZyivEUTs

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023