Fermentation Temperature

I know there are a lot of threads relative to controlling the temperature of the fermentation. However, I am quite hard headed and feel that I must beat the dead horse...
I ferment ALE without the use of temperature control. I have seen some primary temps rise as high as 80F. The normal range of my house and fermentation is about 75F. I have made some really good beers but have always thought that my bad beers were bacterial. I am now beginning to think that its all in the fermentation.

My question is: Am I kidding myself that a 75F fermented beer can turn out good? How about 78F.?

Second question: If I invest in controlling my temps, will I solve my bad beer problems? How important is temp control?

Please help.

Thanks.

Temp control is a big deal. Yeast do different things at different temps, and depending on the style, it might not be helping your beer by having it ferment at such high temperatures.

There are styles though that may benefit from being that warm.

Well, I would use your high temps to your advantage. Brew some belgians, outside of that I think it is much to warm to get consistently clean results from most ale yeasts.

Agreed. If you want to brew a variety of beer styles then I would build a fermentation chamber or figure out some way to control the temps better. A lot of Ales prefer to ferment down in the 60's to low 70's.
I wouldn't go so far as to say this will solve ALL your beer problems but it will eliminate one reason for a beer not turning out well.

if your not convinced you can always experiment. make a batch and split it in half. ferment half your usual way and ferment the other half with temp control. bottle separately and let age side by side. then drink them. you may be surprised at the difference. you may want to do this with a few beers. just because one is fine doesn't mean they all will be fine.

i would look into building a swamp cooler. from what i hear they are cheap and work well. if you like the results then you can consider spending more money to get more reliable temp control.

I'm in a similar situation. I live in Florida and always have to deal with warm household temperatues and no cellar. My house is at 77 most of the year (72 in the short winter), so I'm always fermenting at higher than desired temps. My beers are all pretty good. Not best of show, but good nonetheless. So, I'd recommend the ole RDWHAHB if you're generally happy with your beers. I do think fermenting ales below 70 will help trememdously tho. For the first time, I've set up my own temp control system using spare parts from my other hobby, reef aquariums. I have 2 aquarium chillers that were collecting dust and decided to put one of them to use for beer. I'm using a modified swamp cooler setup using a rope handled bucket with enough water to come up to the beer line in by 6.5g glass carboy fermenter. A spare aquarium power head pumps water out of the bucket, thru the chiller and back to the bucket, creating a nice flow around the fermenter to maintain constant temps.

The chiller I'm using atm is a peltier based chiller, so its not too powerful, but it is managing to keep the water temps at 66-68 deg in a 77 deg room. My other chiller uses a compressor so it's much stronger and could probably chill this amount of water down to 60 or less, but it is a bit noisier and uses more power. The peltier one is pretty quiet as it only as a small fan creating noise and it draw very little power to operate. All things my wife appreciates. This is the first time I've tried it out and the beer is still in the primary. I'm looking forward to a much cleaner ale.

Great responses. I really appreciate your help. The "off" flavors that i am getting are not bandaid, but rather like there is a chemical in the aftertaste. The initial sip is very good, smell is delicious, however, once it hits your tongue it's not so good. I'd say it tastes a little like chlorine or something similar. Yes, i'm using tap water from the city, but i've used well water too and with it i get the same results. So... this is where I'm starting to wonder if it's the fermentation temp resulting in these chemical aftertastes.

Others probably have other experiences and comments, but I wanted to ferment the Wyeast 1010 at 58-62, and was worried it would be too warm in my basement, so I just put my 5 gallon carboy in my cooler with water at 60 degrees. I put a couple of wet t-shirts over it and would take the temp every few hours (when I was home...obviously from work it was a little difficult to monitor the temp). The water temp was always between 58 - 62, and then after 4 or 5 days I moved it out of the water onto the concrete (it's getting cool again here, so it's probably 60 degrees in the basement). If you have a cooler and a thermometer, you're golden. I'm sure others have invested in more expensive equipment....and that IS better, but I'm a cheapskate.

I've only recently returned to homebrewing. I brewed a lot throughout the 90s, then stopped for a lot of reasons that in hindsight were stupid. So, after about a decade, I've just started back up this year. In my earlier brewing days, I never used any temp control whatsoever and consistently made very good beers in the warm climate of Florida. Occasionally, a bad one would crop up, but never so bad that it was undrinkable.

How long are you letting your beers age before trying them out? It might take a little longer for ales brewed at higher temperatures to age out a lot of defects. I'm drinking a wonderful honey wheat beer that I brewed at 77 degrees in my house with no temp control. It is putting a huge smile on my face right now, but when I first tried a bottle, it was fairly harsh and puckering dry. A few weeks later, the harsh notes have mostly gone away and I'm extremely happy with this beer. Bottom line, age does wonders to mellow out the off flavors.

I am in the same boat temp wise pretty much most of the year and I think I know the off flavor you are taking about. Just try to control the temp for the first few days of ferment if you can. I use the plastic storage bins ($5) and cut a hole in the top for the bucket or carboy. Put some frozen water bottles in there with a couple inches of water switching them out every day. After a few days I forget about it. Just doing that has significantly improved my beers taste.

I was listening to the archives of the brewing network a few days ago... Jamil mentioned that many home brewers have ugly baby syndrome. Basically, they say their beer is good, but how many awards have they won, and does anybody else think their beer is good? Not saying you guys don't have good beer and your buddies don't like it... I'm just saying.

Things like pitching the right amount of healthy yeasty, having the right fermentation temp for the style/yeast, and other little things are what separate good beer from great beer. And while I'm happy making good beer, I'd like to be the guy making GREAT beer.

There is also the "My way is the right way" syndrome in which if someone doesn't follow the the latest greatest methods of homebrewing, the end product will inevitably be inferior. Well, that's probably true actually. However, that end product will often still be on par or better than 90% of the beers seen in your local supermarket. I would venture to guess that most folks that homebrew don't really care about an award winner, after all, I'm sure BMC have won awards at some point in their history. I would guess most want the pleasure of making their own and being satisfied with the result. Using the absolute simplest methods, that satisfaction is usually obtained. I don't know if the OP is on his first homebrew or his 100th, but I think its a good idea to keep things very simple at first and then start taking basic steps to work on improvements so you can see how process adjustments affect your beer.

As for how other folks like my beers, that's always a subjective test. My first batch I brewed after a 10 year hiatus was a Porter that I wanted to make similar to Sierra Nevada. I used my normal method of brewing that I used in the 90s (250 batches or so), that is, primary until the kreusen falls, rack to secondary until it looks like fermentation was complete, then bottle. That process took 6 days in my 77 deg house with no temperature control. I always try my first beer after 1 week in the bottle just to get an idea on how things are going. Well, I had a had my wife and a neighbor perform a blind taste test at this point, so I poured a glass of mine and a glass of Sierra Nevada. I held both out for my guinea pigs and they sampled. I tried to nudge both the wife and neighbor towards the Sierra Nevada glass as being the better beer. My wife agreed, but my neighbor liked mine better (btw, I thought my neighbor was nuts, SN was definitely tons better at this stage). Its now been y weeks since then and most of the sharper notes from my Porter have gone away and it is now heavenly. I'd put it up agains SN anyday. The wife agrees.

The trick is, could I repeat that quality if I did things exactly the same way with the same ingredients. Probably not. It might get better or worse. It might taste quite a bit different. I feel making some of those simple process improvements aids in making more consistent high quality brews. I started out very simple 20 years ago, was encouraged by the simple brews and slowly made improvements. The first being not using corn sugar as a prime fermentable. The most significant was making a starter. Once I began making starters, my beers became a little better, but were dramatically more consistent. Now that I've returned to brewing I am looking to improve the process and am going about it in a slow methodical way. I've brewed 6 batches since returning to brewing in February, only the last one has the process change of trying to control fermentation temps less than 70 deg. I do expect a noticeable improvement.

I've made great beers without temp control in Florida. I've made good beers. I've also made crap beers, but these have been a very few. A simple swamp cooler will definitely improve Old Crow's brews. I also think Old Crow's current beer will be significantly better just letting it sit for a couple of more of weeks.

Schweer said:

However, that end product will often still be on par or better than 90% of the beers seen in your local supermarket.

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I don't know what is at your supermarket but I have never met a homebrewer who brews consistently better beer than is available commonly from commercial brewers.

Some of the best beers I have had were home brewed and the others were commercial, same with the worst. If I want 5-6 really great beers I am better off at the store than pretty much any homebrewers house. Maybe you are the exception, but I've heard that "my beer is better than anything at the store" line a million times and I never agreed.

Ugly baby syndrome is very real. A lot of people have a personality such that they want to think their baby is beautiful, their 6 year old well behaved, their comb-over is fooling everybody, they are really smarter than their boss, and they make the best beer in the world. 99% of homebrewers think their beer is better than average, about half of them are wrong.

Active temp control is not some new fangled home brewing trick. The best brewers have been doing it for decades, the worst brewers still don't do it. Some people do very well with low tech solutions. Nobody can brew all ale styles year round without some form of temp control and do well, thats a fact even if you don't want to believe it.

An IPA fermented at 58 (winter) and one fermented at 80 (summer) will taste drastically different. Anybody who thinks they are both just hunky dory is easy to please or kidding themselves.

Since 90% of the beers in a supermarket are BMC, yes a simple homebrew will be better. Maybe I should have said "sold" in a supermarket.

Yes, basic fementation chillers have been around forever. However the OPs question was is it a must to use the lower temps to get a decent tasting beer. To that, I stil would say no. It will improve it tho and make it more consistent.