Buck13 wrote: Mon Feb 04, 2019 11:00 am
spittingglass wrote: Tue Jan 08, 2019 10:57 pm
I've been brewing for about 10 years now, but I've slowed down recently. Girlfriend started using the fermenting fridge to store kimchi and I don't want to mix the two.
I would hope that the proper fermentation vessels would keep the respective micro-organisms in their place! Making a SMALL batch fermented with kimchi bugs might be interesting, though. Probably gonna be really sour. Some people like that sort of thing...I appreciate it in infrequent doses.
Were you brewing lager in the fridge?
It'd definitely be a sour, the main bug fermenting kimchi is lactobacillus. They'd be all over the place, and short of bleaching every square centimeter inside, I wouldn't 100% trust the fridge to ferment a clean batch after. That and the smell of kimchi is like no other and seeps in to EVERYTHING.
And I have lagered in it a few times. I built an Arduino/Raspberry Pi temperature controller and have the fridge hooked in to one outlet and a heatgun in the other. Heatgun stays inside the fridge to raise the temperature if needed. It allows me to control the ferment temp to within +/- 0.1°F and set a full ferment temperature schedule (60° for 3 days, bring it up to 65 in steps for two days, then cold crash at 33° for 24 hours, etc).
With that kind of temp control and the ability to set a full schedule, there's no reason not to ferment everything in it. Controlling ferment temps is key in making good, CONSISTENT homebrew.