Cooling Off (the wine, silly)

I've been thinking about ways to keep my white wine fermentations cool and slow. So far my solution has been to put the fermentation bucket in a tub, fill the tub with water, and drop ice packs in the water to keep it cool. The temps (and resulting wine) have been variable.

A thread by Sean on the WMT wine forum prompted me to get moving on this. I will need the help of my engineer son Adam. We started spec'ing it out today. We'll use a different model than Sean did. He pumped the wine itself through the cooler. I plan on only pumping the tub water through the cooler, using the water as a coolant.

I'm trying hard to contribute. I had never heard of peltier coolers, but after doing some research I found one on Amazon that seems to meet Adam's requirements. In response Adam texted,

"I checked out the specs on that TEC, it's max current is 15A but it has the various DT curves down to 3A. If we design the control loop right I bet we can get away with a 3-6A current."

Right.

Anyway, we're tentatively planning to use an Arduino unit as the controller. I'd never heard of that either until today. Stay tuned.

In the meantime today we smoked some salmon for dinner.

Dave's Smoked Salmon

My brother, upon learning I now have a BGE, sent me his favorite smoked salmon recipe. We gave it a go.

The fish is soaked in a brine with bay leaves and maple syrup overnight. Then the next morning you form a "pellicle" on the fish by drying it in front of a fan for 4 hours.

The fish becomes tacky. The thinner parts looked as if they had been smoked already by the time this step was complete - they were translucent and firm. The fish then went onto the grill. The BGE was easy to dial in at 200F.

The recipe says to baste hourly with maple syrup. It took only three hours to get to the desired internal temp of 145F.

Delicious! We'll do this again when Jake gets home. Thanks Dave!