Idea's For Summer Brewing?

Buy a freezer with temp control.

 

I would say you seem to be on the right path. Make a small fermentation room or something that you can control the temperature of. A small AC and little space should be able to hold mid 60s for a temp in that weather. Depending on your craftiness and willingness, you could rig up a solar panel or heat pump like thing to make it more budget friendly (yes the up front cost really isn't....).

I plan to do something similar, just opposite. Here in Maine I am trying to stay above 55 in the winter, so a small little closet/room/chest with a little heater/pad to keep things in the mid 60s. Wood stove won't heat the upstairs enough and oil heating is not where I want to through a lot of money. I do intend to rig up some solar panels for this kind of thing too (whole house really but mostly as emergency back up).

 

Always easier/cheaper to keep the fermenter cool than the whole brew room. A temp-controlled fermentation chamber is usually the best answer unless you have good insulation in that brew room.
Just plug something like this into a chest freezer:
https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&k...qmt=p&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_8imdt31kze_p

 

I'll mention a few possibilities, but one thing I want to be clear on is what you are picturing with the window AC unit. It's true that it will not have to work as hard if it is cooling a smaller area, but otherwise I don't see why putting it in the window is any worse that putting it in the corner. It really depends on what you mean by putting it in the corner, I guess. Maybe I'm not understanding the layout that is being considered. (I see you have a small freezer to use. Sounds great, just make sure the fermenter fits okay complete with airlock. Problem solved, but I'll leave the rest of my post up for other people who might be considering the same question.)

1. You can always brew beers that can be fermented successfully at high temperatures. The classic one is a saison, and several Belgian yeast strains can also be used at modestly high temperatures (probably not, like, Texas outside summer temperatures, more like mid-70s).

Recently a Norwegian farmhouse type of yeast called "kveik" has come on the market. Some strains of this yeast are extraordinary in that they seem to ferment best in the 90s or even low 100s Fahrenheit. You can read about kveik a little here, a lot more here (particularly here, here, and here), and you can buy a particular strain of it here. (There is another strain sold by Omega as "Hothead" yeast. It is similar, though not identical, and can also be used in the 90s.) You do not have to use the yeast to brew a traditional Norwegian beer: I have recently use it to brew a gose (sour German-style wheat beer) and a hoppy beer, roughly an IPA. I fermented both in the 90s. I'll let you know how they taste once I've sampled them (I just bottled them).

2. If you are in west Texas, where I assume it is fairly dry, a swamp cooler setup might work okay. Basically you put your fermenter in a shallow water bath with a towel or t-shirt or something draped over the fermenter and into the water. Then you direct a fan at the fermenter to evaporate the water and cool it down. This might not work so well in a humid area such as east Texas. You can also achieve reasonably low temperatures with a full water bath, into which you throw a frozen water bottle or two from time to time. The downside of both of these approaches is that they are fairly imprecise, so you won't really know what temperatures you are achieving.

3. A chest freezer can be a good option. You might also consider a BrewJacket, which is what I use. It works by insulating the fermenter and then keeping it cool with an aluminum rod that extends down into the beer. It has some advantages over a chest freezer. Most notably, it is small and easy to move from place to place. It also purports to be more energy efficient (I can't confirm that). I personally would not use it with a sour beer, since aluminum generally doesn't work well with highly acidic food items. But from your posts I've gathered you are not into brewing sour beers.

The big downside of the BrewJacket, aside from price (though I note it is competitive with a new chest freezer), is that it is fairly noisy. It is not suitable for a bedroom.

 

Larry, I'd work with your small freezer before trying to use the window air-conditioner "in a corner." The window air-conditioners have to stick their ass end out of a window for a reason, and that is because they give off the heat that is taken from the ambient air in the room and kick it out the back while kicking the cool air out the front and into your room. Unless you can exhaust the hot air from the back of the air-conditioner out of the house (or to some place outside of your fermentation area), all you've done is heat some air and cool some air "in a corner" that will become mixed again. The winner is the electric company.

Using your freezer with an external thermostat is the best way to go, and there are many threads here with descriptions of the best way to do it, freezer size, etc. Just do a search on 'fermentation chamber' and you'll get many ideas.

However, a cheaper option may be a 'swamp cooler,' and especially so if your fermentation area is in your basement where it is already somewhat cooler than the temp in the rest of your house. Google 'swamp cooler' and you'll get a lot of info on ways to make one of those. Some videos also exist on YouTube.

 

I am still kicking myself for chunking an old fridge that had the auto defrost element broken. Knowing what I know now it would have been a perfect fermentation chamber.

 

I will just say that basements really don't exist except in extremely rare circumstances in Texas. From a real estate website... 4 reasons why homes in Texas don't have basements.
http://www.zarealestate.com/4-reasons-homes-texas-dont-basements/

 

https://www.amazon.com/Inkbird-Itc-...keywords=inkbird+temperature+controller&psc=1

Now you're all set.