Hot Apartment Hacks- how to keep your hot sauce cool

We live in an old row house apartment building with radiators that are controlled by a thermostat in the hallway upstairs. The heating system seems to have a mind of its own and while we can go turn the heat down if we need to, it comes on sometimes during the day if a lot of people are opening the street door or it gets really cold outside. It can be excessively toasty in our place; overheating can cause problems when we brew beer, it can cause bread dough to rise too quickly, and it can cause over-fermentation of hot sauce or yogurt or kefir. Since I can’t control the temperature in the apartment very well, I figured out a way to control the temperature of the beer fermenter hot sauce jars with a very crude evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler.

The concept is that evaporating water is a couple of degrees cooler than the room temperature air; this is the same principle behind why our bodies sweat to cool themselves. We found that by placing our fermenter bucket in a larger basin with a couple of inches of water in it, then smoothing a damp towel up the side of the bucket to act as a wick for the water so that it was evaporating over part of the surface area of the bucket, it kept the beer at a more even temperature and kept the yeast from heating itself up as much as it eats up the sugar.

When I checked on the sriracha yesterday, it was already bubbly and expanding in the jars. I hadn’t expected it to be working for a couple more days but since it has been so warm in here, I wasn’t surprised. I don’t want it to ferment so quickly that the complex flavors that develop during a slow and moderated fermentation to get lost and the whole mash to go sour so I put the jars in larger plastic boxes and poured a little water in the bottom, then wrapped one side of the jars in a wet paper towel. Most of the water had evaporated out of the plastic containers today, so I topped them up. That’s a good sign that they’re working.

I’ll continue to stir the mash and keep an eye and nose on the jars for the next couple of days but it smelled good and there wasn’t anything too funky going on yet. I’ll keep checking on it over the next few days and add water as needed.

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