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Review: Stainless Steel Brew Bucket and FTSs Temp Control

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Check out the video above to see my full review of these two items from Ss Brewing Technologies: The Brew Bucket and the FTSs Fermentation Temperature Control System.

Transcript:

Hey Brewers it’s Billy Broas from the homebrewacademy reviewing a new gadget for you guys. One I’ve been using for a little bit and I’m really excited to share with you. And this is from SS brew tech, now I should clarify here I’m actually reviewing two different items. These are two different products, but because they go together like peanut butter and jelly. Made sense to review them together.

So, they are the brew bucket and this is a ferment or a “stainless steel fermenter” and then there is the FTS fermentation system. And that’s a way to regulate fermentation temperatures. So there’s a fermenter and then there is the way to control the temperatures- and I guess said they go together really well!

FTSs-homebrew

So the FTS is made for the brew bucket. They also make conical fermenters, larger conical fermenters and they have temperature control systems for those as well. I’ve never used their conical before so I’m just going to focus on the brew bucket and the FTS that goes with it. So the brew bucket gives this fermentor, you see before you.

And just to clarify this neoprene sleeve does not come with the brew bucket. It goes with the FTS. I think feel like taking it off so I’ll show you a picture of what it looks like when it’s not wearing this jacket. Here but this is a 6.95 gallon stainless steel fermenter. I’ve been trying to go stainless for my fermenters for a long time. Those conical fermenters are so damn expensive I could just never justify it.

So it’s nice that this is a pretty affordable stainless steel fermenter. Stainless is not cheap, this at the time of this video is a hundred ninety five dollars on the SS brew tech website which which is what you’re going to pay for stainless. And I think it’s a great value.

So my journey has really been from glass carboys to plastic, and then to a better type of plastic which is the the spidel I’ve been using. So I really upgraded from mainly better bottles plastic better bottles to the spidel fermenter which I really love. You might have seen my video on that.

And now to the stainless fermenter and stainless and brewing!

It’s really the pinnacle even on the hot side if you’ve gone from an aluminum kettle to a stainless kettle. You know that there’s a big difference there and there’s still different qualities of stainless steel. This is really high quality, when you see this you will be impressed by it. It’s really nice, so let me show it to you a little bit it’s got a nice stainless lid on it you can see there. It has a hole drilled for the airlock. I would say that this hole is actually pretty sharp and so first I try putting the the blow-off tube in there, which I almost always do with my fermenters.

So I just put a I think was half an inch silicone blow-off tube into here to put it through the hole. And cut a slit in the hole, because it’s pretty sharp. And then the same thing happened with the airlock – you use one of these small rubber stoppers here and it cut off a slit I cut in that as well. So I was kind of disappointed by that but I talked to the guys at the company and they were aware that and they’ve actually fixed it since then. So on the the newer lids and here’s a good example, so the lids that come with the still got some water in there. 

So the lids that come with the FTS, this you probably can’t tell but it’s a much smoother – so that’s not going to cut into any hose or any stopper that you put in there. So that kind of stunk, but I’m glad that they’re on top of things and they fixed that. So you shouldn’t have to worry about it now.

FTss-coils

We also have these great latches on the side, these are spring-loaded latches so they’re really strong just really durable and it’s easy to take the lid on and off. And then you also have these handles on the side as well so it makes this thing really easy to lift. And for being stainless steel it’s it’s really light when empty.

Now on the bottom, you have some rubber caps. So that’s nice, it’s not going to scratch up something that you put it on. And these things are stackable as well, I only have one but you could easily get multiple root buckets and stack these things up. So if you’re fermenting in like I do normally, until I got this if you’re fermenting in a chest freezer. Obviously you’re going to have to lift this thing out of there. But with the handles make that really easy and there’s still enough room between the floor and the bottom of the valve there they can still get a gravity reading.

So I just stick a small cup under there and I get plenty plenty of beer to take a gravity reading. But this is really nice, this barbed valve here you can easily take a gravity reading or you can transfer into a keg or into your bottling bucket. And it’s got a little handle here, and a really cool thing about this is that you can rotate it and the spigot.

So I’ll show you guys the spigot; you can rotate the the valve here and it’ll rotate the spigot. So what I do when I’m filling up the fermenter, I rotate the spigot down so it doesn’t get filled up with a bunch of troob. And then when I transfer out of it I rotate it up and I rotate it to the point that I start getting clear. Beautiful seeing through the tubing so that’s really nice. So you can avoid transferring a lot of troob over to your your keg or your bottling bucket or another fermenter.

brew-bucket-volumes

Another nice thing about it is that you can easily see how much beer you have in here. There’s markings on the inside for the gallons, it’s at four or five and six and the half gallons are marked. As well, they’re etched on there which is nice. I know my old plastic carboy so I’ll just put tape on the outside but that got really messy. And because this mouth is it’s so wide you can really get in there. You can get your arm in there and you can scrub it out and with stainless steel that’s one of the great benefits of it. It’s tough and it cleans up really easily and it’s not porous at all. You’re not going to get bacteria hiding in there like you might with plastic if you get a scratch in your plastic carboy.

brew-bucket

And finally this thing is just really compact so you can see by the size of this it’s very small. It’s about the size of a five or six gallon plastic carboy. So it’s got a small footprint which is really important to me. I don’t like my gear taking up a ton of room. So this is a really great fermenter!

So lets me move on now and talk about the FTS. So like I said these two things go together like peanut butter and jelly. I feel like if you get the brew bucket then you almost have to get the FTS. they just work really well together.

So I’ll demonstrate here how it works, I mean this is essentially just a way to control your fermentation temperatures – which is super important, especially when fermentation heats up there or the first few days and you want to bring it back down. So what essentially does is it it recirculates cold or hot water. If you want to heat it up, it can do that as well. But it recirculates water through these coils in the beer, so the beers about maybe right here and you have an external heating or cooling source.

I’ll show that to you in a second and this just goes on the lid here. So when you get this kit, you can see you get the coils and you get this specialty lid here with the holes already cut. And I was surprised by how easy it was to set up. I was a little intimidated at first, but it’s really it’s not a whole lot of parts and I got this whole thing set up in about five or ten minutes.

So you really just screw in or you bolt on the coils here and then there’s a thermo well right here that bolts on. So you have three holes total two for the coils and one for the thermo l and then, of course, the one for the airlock or blow up tube.

So that goes on like that and then you have your very nice controller here. And when it lights up you get these nice blue numbers so that goes on the middle this is the temperature probe here, which of course goes into the thermo well and you have your airlock that goes on here. And they also, like I said when I was using the blow-off tube, I just put the tubing in through this airlock hole.

Now they actually have a blow-up tube assembly that looks like it works a lot better and it’s a barb that gets bolted on through this hole.

I’ll try to show you the cooling source –  so here we go so you’re going to have to set this up yourself. I had to buy a separate cooler for this. I didn’t have one of my own, you might have one that’ll work. This is a cord cooler and I found that works really well too. I’ve seen a lot of coolers that people are using with this and they’re freaking huge and I don’t think they have to be that big. And that’s kind of the whole point of this thing is to have a smaller footprint.

So it was this corded one worked great for me, and I cut the holes in it through the lid. And then you get the tubing with the kit as well. The bottle tubing which you just need to cut in half because you’re going to have two pieces. You have the begin and the out and then you get the pump as well. So there’s the pump, so all you do is you take the two pieces of tubing and you hook them up to the end and the out.

Let me show you a really short clip –  it’ll much better demonstrate how this whole thing works. So coming out of the controller and you have your temperature probe which is right here and that goes into the thermo well. You can see it actually just cut on don’t know if you can notice that. And there’s the cat ,she loves this thing too.

So this goes into the thermo well – it’s pretty cool, so this looks pretty short right? But you can actually pull this out and then if you have a lot of slack, I had a lot of slack you can tuck it back in into the controller there. Which is pretty cool, so you don’t have a bunch of wire dangling.

Okay, so that goes into there and then this is power. So I just had this hooked up to an outlet and then over here this is power to a pump. So let me show you that all right?We have the pump down at the bottom here right there that sits on the bottom. And then I just have the one frozen bottle in here right now.

Fermentation is over right now, and I’m just maintaining – so it’s not too hard to keep it there. So all I need is one frozen one quart or one liter bottle, so that’s enough. And then, so it so pumps through here so you can see I drilled the holes in the lid right here. And those are pretty tight so, it pumps through here goes through the coils that are underneath the lid and they go into the bucket and then it returns through this one comes back through here and you just saw spitting water back in here and that’s it and then it recirculates back through. So obviously an example of how you can change the settings on this thing.

So you can see I set it at and we’re at sixty nine point eight right now. So it really doesn’t much overshoot at all it’s going to wind up pre pretty darn close to whatever your setpoint is. So the way it works really simple, just click set here and if I want to set it to say get out of there hit set again. And I don’t know if you can hear that but you can probably see it cut on so it tells the pump we need colder water in here, and so the pump cuts on brings it down to and as long as that water is cold enough to bring it down to.

Then you’ll be good, so it’s a pretty simple setup –  but pretty brilliant too and works really well.

So my experience using this the cooling has worked really well. So on the most recent brew, I chilled down to with my plate chiller and then I took this down to using the FTS and I only took maybe 5 minutes tops. With a couple frozen water bottles in there, I normally do a one gallon frozen bottle in here with a couple maybe one or two one liter frozen bottles and that works great. I was worried about maybe having to change them out all the time but at the peak of fermentation, you check it once a day maybe even once every two days and you’re good to go.

It’s not going to overshoot like a swamp cooler where there’s no temperature regulation. You want to see in a blog post I did a few years back where I did that and I put too many frozen water bottles in the swamp cooler and it overshot like crazy. That’s not going to happen with this.

You just need to make sure that your your water here is cold enough to get it down to where ever you want it, and then the controller will handle the rest. So you’re not going to be changing out bottles a whole lot. I haven’t tried lagering, I really doubt you could lager with this because of course with the lagering process, you need to bring it down to near freezing degrees and hold it for months. Not really feasible.

You could ferment a lager though, I believe that is possible, although I haven’t tried it. So if you want to hold it at say 45degrees I think that’s very doable, you’re going to have to check can change out the bottles a little bit more. But it’s definitely something I think it’s possible.

So overall I’m really happy with both of these. If you ever wanted a stainless steel fermenter and you’re like me and you just couldn’t afford the conical, this is a really great way to go and that’s a great price for a stainless steel fermenter. So it’s not cheap, but like I said at the time of this video. And then the FTS fermentation control super important.

This is a small footprint way to do it and it just works so well with with the brew bucket here and it’s so efficient having the coils in here versus doing something like the chest freezer. s

There’s certain people of course, that are totally fine just fermenting in a plastic bucket. And that’s totally cool if that’s your thing, but there’s a lot of people that want to spend the money on higher quality. So the question for them is is this worth it?

And yes I think it is. I think if you buy this the system one or both of these it shows up at your house you’re going to be impressed by it. You’re not going to think it’s a waste of money. The biggest drawback to the FTS is obviously changing out the water bottles. But what again do is it’s a great system and you got to have a heating or cooling source somehow.

So it doesn’t bother me if you really want to get away from that and not have to do anything manual – then you’re looking at a glycol system, which actually plenty of people have done with this and so that could work really well too. So hope that helped you guys out if you have any questions or comments leave them down in the comment section and I will talk to you later, thanks!

Where to buy the Brew Bucket and FTSs?

Thanks to Ss Brewing Technologies for providing the FTSs for review.

If you have questions about the gear or want to share your own experience, leave a comment below.

Related Posts:

Comments

      • Hey Larry, let me see if I can get you a good answer from Ss Brew Tech. Not that I know anything about constructing these things, but would it really be the same cost to add a double-wall?

        Reply

  2. Billy:
    Nice explanation of system. I have a brew bucket and a chronical and FTS for both. They both work great. First time I actually forgot to add insulation wrap to chronical and just wrapped with reflectic insulation and and blanket and system still held temp well (@ 65 F) even at high fermentation in a 70 degree room.

    Reply

    • Thanks for the comment Roy. Very cool you have both the brew bucket and the conical. Yea, it holds the temp very well.

      Reply

  3. Billy…you seem to be schilling for some provisioners of new but not necessary home brew equipment (how else would you have gotten that professionally produced clip if the Ss company had not provided it)? The crap about rotating the spigot to eliminate trube is so inconsequential, especially if you rack to a secondary. I could easily buy a cheap gauge stainless steel pot of like dimensions from some place like the webstuarant store add a weldless stainless steel bulkhead thru fitting and attach the lid w/ 3 small c clamps and achieve the same thing for much less than $200.00 plus shipping. Are they paying you or do you just get free stuff? I brew great beer and use a bunch of 5 gallon plastic ex-pickle containers that I have outfitted w/ cheap spigots that I got from the Brauhaus.com. this way the fermenters are also my bottling buckets and transferring from primary to secondary to bottles is simple and cheap! As for controlling fermentation temperature that’s simple…brew ales in the summer, fermenting in your basement or crawl space and brew lagers in the winter and ferment in your garage. Incidently, I brew 10 gal batches @ about $35.00 per and my friends can’t wait to be invited over for brewskis. I usually enjoy your emails but this does not seem an objective product review to me…anyone else?

    Reply

    • Well, Billy said (more than a couple of times) that it’s not for everyone, and that if you’re happy brewing in plastic buckets, that’s cool, too. And you seem to be doing quite well with the methods you’re employing.

      But for those who do want a more advanced system for regulating temperature, or who like those kinds of systems, or who feel such things really bring their beer to a higher level, then a product demonstration video such as this is valuable.

      This is not a system I’m interested in; I can regulate my temperatures pretty well with what I’m doing now. And I’m not trying to reach “the next level” of brewing, since I’m pretty much the only one who drinks my beer, and I like what I’m brewing. But this was an interesting, informative video. Regardless of how he got the equipment (and I think it’s unfair for you to assume that he’s getting remuneration under the table to shill for any manufacturer), Billy’s online presentations are geared to educate and inform. As I said, I’m not interested in getting this involved with my homebrew. I like to say I’m making beer, not sending a rocket to the moon, and the simpler the better, IMO. That being said, my competition results have pleased me, so I must be doing something right with the system and procedures I’ve been using.

      No, this is not for everyone. But it may be just what some homebrewers are looking for, and this video provides a comprehensive review of a system that some may not be aware of.

      Reply

    • Hey James, to address your points:

      – This comment -> “how else would you have gotten that professionally produced clip if the Ss company had not provided it”. I’m not even entirely sure what this comment means, but I am happy you think the video looks good because I thought the audio was crap haha. As far as Ss Brew Tech paying me — of course not. They provided the FTSs for review (as I stated in the post) and I bought the brew bucket myself.

      – Your comment comes off as evangelical. It’s like you’re saying “I brew this certain way and everyone else should too.” That’s fine if your process works for you, but not everyone wants to brew that way. I acknowledge in my video (as FedoraDave pointed out) that this equipment is not for everyone and if you want to brew in plastic buckets that is totally fine. I think you should be as equally open minded that some people want to use higher quality equipment and would rather pay for something turnkey rather than spend time building it on their own. Look no further than the massive success of Blichmann Engineering to tell you that there is a large segment of homebrewers who enjoy higher-end gear. Is the wool being pulled over the eyes of tens of thousands of homebrewers? I don’t think so.

      – I’m not the only one who is a fan of the Brew Bucket and FTSs. Search the web and it’s gotten many glowing reviews.

      When it comes to cars I do not have fancy taste. I drive a 13 year old beat up Hyundai Elantra. Because I don’t care about having a nice car. But I don’t judge people who buy $50,000 BMW’s — they just have different values than me.

      For the people that are considering buying the Ss Brew Tech gear, I hope they find this review helpful. I think they will.

      Reply

    • ** As for controlling fermentation temperature that’s simple…brew ales in the summer, fermenting in your basement or crawl space and brew lagers in the winter and ferment in your garage. **

      Today’s high is 95 and that’s the lowest high temp in the ten day forecast. No one has basements here in the south and most home construction is slab-on-grade rather than crawl space (though I doubt a crawl space is at optimal ale temperatures when the aforementioned forecast).

      Leaving it in the air conditioned house would make the beer in the mid-70s which is 5-10 degrees warmer than I’d like to ferment my beer.

      I won’t be jumping on this bandwagon but it is an option to replace the deep freeze that I currently use as a fermentation chamber.

      Reply

      • Hey, Bryan, I *have* a basement, but our temps here in the Metro NYC area have been in the 90s lately, and my ales have been fermenting in the low 70s. Oh well. They’re turning out okay, though. And I made a saison earlier in the summer and fermented it upstairs in my beer closet. It got into the high 80s, and turned out to have some very pleasant esters.

        As for lagers, I have a fridge with a Johnson Controller, so the temp can be rigidly regulated. I’m a lot more casual with my ales. Most of the time, though, they ferment in the low to mid-60s in my basement. This summer has just been a killer, that’s all.

        Reply

  4. Billy, very informative review and very apreciate as im looking to put my hands in one of those. For those which are still with doubts you have another good review by beerlover1983brew which present a review, in two parts, before and post fermentation. A question: As i have fermentation chamber i just want the Bucket, do you know if this is possibel to mount a termowell in a plain lid without the chiller?

    Reply

  6. Billy,

    Great posting. Like you am currently fermenting in Speidel’s and not sure this would be enough for me to switch over but nice to have another less expensive alternative to SS Conical. Did have a question for you. You mentioned that you used your plate chiller to get temp down to 70 and then let the FTS bring it down the rest of the way. Could you have also just attached 2 garden hose adapters to the in/out connectors and used the FTS like an immersion chiller to get down to 70 and then connect the cooler and pump after and have that take over? Seems like it would work although not sure if could be an issue where the FTS sits higher whereas an immersion chiller would rest on the bottom of the kettle. Just curious as to your take on this.

    Thanks,
    Bob

    Reply

  7. I wonder how the SS FTS compares to a VERY similar solution.
    http://www.gotta-brew.com/products/cool-zone-cooling-jacket.html

    Upside for the coolzone might be:
    – can use with other fermenters too.
    – no cleaning or sanitization impact
    – can add heating and a 2 stage controller at a similar price point as FTS

    The SS FTS is prettier and has the custom neoprene jacket.. but i feel like I could pretty simply replace the jacket with a trip to home depot.

    This assumes the coolzone is reasonably similar in efficiency. Anyone use one of the coolzone?

    Reply

  9. They now have a brewmaster bucket that has a thermowell. So you can use it with your normal temp control setup as opposed to having to buy the FTSs. Just used it for the first time and it worked great. Fit perfectly in my chest freezer.

    Reply

  10. Great review. I’m looking into getting a Brew Bucket (or two) to add to my chemistry set. I consider myself an advance novice home brewer but I like shiny things. I have a couple of questions for you Billy. 1) With the conical fermenter can the secondary fermentation step be skipped or is it still required? 2) Does the stainless brew bucket respond well to external temperature management e.g. heat belts or cooling jackets?

    Reply

    • Hey Tony, thanks for reading the site.

      1) I’m probably the wrong guy to ask that question to because I almost always skip the secondary, no matter what.

      2) I haven’t tested it so I can’t give you a good answer. I would shoot a note to the crew at SS BrewTech. They are great at responding.

      Cheers!

      Reply

  11. Alright Billy good video son, very informative. In fact a geezer I know has a few of these for sale so I may just help myself and take the plunge, as for the muppet who tries to brew real ale in is crawl space you obviously dont get out a lot so grow ya self a coulpe and make a fermentation chamber, cheap as chips and easy as 123. You will get better ales with more consitant flavours and charataristics, so butter up chap take that blouse off and man up a little, good old billy here just given a few punters the heads up of whats about if ya dont like it dont watch it! Alright buttercup

    Reply

  12. I just picked up one of these bad boys, baby step before moving into a full on conical fermenter. Did not get the temperature control but might make that plunge this summer, gets pretty hot down here in Texas.

    Reply

  13. I have a couple of these with the temperature control and love them. A bit of advice, Ss doesn’t currently sell the neoprene jacket separately. To clean and preserve the jacket, I wash it occasionally in wet suit cleaner that you can pick up anywhere that sells dive gear.

    Reply

  14. Hi Billy, thanks for the incredibly informative video. I have a 10 gallon Blichmann conical fermenter system and really hope to upgrade to some method to keep fermentation cool this summer. This seems to be the best method, but nothing seems to fit my conical very well. Maybe this temperature controller will work, augmented by a nice down sleeping bag wrapped around the conical? What do you think? I live in Santa Rosa, so house temperature rarely exceeds 85°. I already have one refrigerator in the garage for the serving tank and it’s difficult to find a refrigerator that fits the very wide Blichmann conical system. If you think the controller will be sufficient to keep 10 gallons in check, then I think this is going to be my method. Thanks for the advice

    Reply

  15. Hi Billy,

    i was wondering if you could tell me during fermentation, what did you use for ice in the cooler? I am really interested in the FTSS heating and chilling I have read you could use a couple frozen 2 litre bottles in a cooler with 5 gallons of water.

    How often did you have to replace/add ice to the cooler during fermentation?

    What was the temperature of the room the fermenter/cooler was in?

    Where I live my garage can get to triple digit during the day and as cool as low 50’s at night.

    Thanks in advance.

    Jerry

    Reply

  16. Recently purchased the brew bucket and have used it a couple times. Like the product of stainless steel and started looking into the FTS cooling system as my basement still hits low seventies at best in the middle of summer and I’m sure fermentation is higher than that. The unfortunate thing about the FTS system for the brewbucket is the cost. for $250 you can control ale temps but still not do any lagering. You can buy a small chest freezer for 150-175 and add a $30 controller, still use the thermowell upgrade on the brewbucket, and for $200 you can now control ales an lagers. It seems like the initial product is a good price but then the accessories that only fit on this device are raised up since you pretty much have to buy them from the ss site. Even if you get this system for $250, if you rack to a secondary what then, yet another controller system instead of switching out the brewbucket in the fermentation fridge for the secondary glass carboy?

    The cost just doesn’t make sense:
    Coil is basically a small version of an immersion wort chiller, stainless steel – $70
    Temperature controller – $35
    Submersible pump – $35
    Vinyl tube – $3
    Thermowell with thermometer – $25
    Lid – $15?
    Neoprene jacket – $25?
    Total – $208

    Does the jacket and new lid really justify $82 for these two?

    I like the brew bucket but $250 to control ale temps with one specific fermenter and then have to throw another 150-175 later for a lagering chamber or for glass secondaries just doesn’t make sense. I think I will stick with the brewbucket but purchase a small chest freezer and temp. controller that I can place the thermometer into the brewbucket thermowell upgrade without purchasing the new lid assembly and then can also brew lagers as well.

    Is there something I am missing?

    Reply

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