Accidental Cooling Experiment

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Bmorebrew

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"Oh sh*t".

That was my exact statement last night when I realized I had accidentally cooled my fermenting beer to 35°. I brewed a rye IPA last Saturday and decided to check my gravity and just see how things were going yesterday afternoon. After a total of four days fermenting, I saw a nice, beautiful, thick, creamy krausen sitting on top - way too thick to try to grab a gravity reading. But since I knew I would have the lid to my fermenting chamber open for several minutes, I turned the thermostat off. Unknowingly, when I turned it back on at around 5pm, it had reset - from 67° to 35°. So at 9pm, when I was done bottling a different batch, I noticed the low temperature. I have several things in there, water bottles amongst them to help mitigate temperature fluctuations, and everything was cold. I left the lid to the chamber open last night with a small space heater and it was back to normal this morning at about 68°.

TL;DR: Day four of fermentation, beer got cooled to 35° within 4 hours. Back to 68° 8 hours later.

So, I guess we'll call this an experiment. I'm not really worried about off-flavors necessarily, just that it might take a few more days to attenuate fully. Which I can't really afford - its for a brew swap in mid-March. :drunk:
 
I'm 100% sure that you're right, but the bucket certainly felt too cold for comfort. And like I mentioned, I have several 1 and 2 liter bottles of water in there, as well as a case of beer that is bottle conditioning right now and they were all pretty cold. Sure, the beer has about 10x the thermal mass as the 2 liter bottle of water. I didn't actually grab a temperature reading from anything, but everything felt a lot colder than I felt comfortable with. I'm more curious now at this point to see if it will even have any noticeable effect.
 
IMHO, if the yeast did not actually "freeze", IE rupture the cell walls, they should wake back up. It's as if you chose to store the brew in the refrigerator to cold crash it. Yeast still wake up and eat the bottling solution.
 
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