High Fermentation Temp

I've failed to watch the weather to notice that the temperatures in Indy were going to be in the high-70's all week - so my beer has been fermenting at about 76 degrees for the past 12+ hours. This morning I put it in a swamp cooler with some ice packs to try to bring that temperature down. Is my beer to taste "off?" Oh yeah, it's a pumpkin beer.

How long into the fermentation was it when the temp was up in the 70s? Also, what strain of yeast did you use?

WYeast 1728, possibly 12 hours. It started fermenting while I was at work yesterday and I failed to look at the temperature before leaving. When I got home yesterday is when I noticed it and put it water.

Edit - WYeast says the temp range is 55-75F

I imagine you'll have some fruity Esters, probably not what you want with the spiciness of a pumpkin beer... Just let it ferment for a little longer than normal at cooler temps, hopefully the yeast will clean it up a bit.

You also might have some fussel alcohols, the yeast will hopefully clean some of then up too, and depending on the abv they might not be noticeable.

So the short answer is, just give the beer a little longer than normal to clean up, and who knows, it could turn out to be your favorite beer ever.

Also, the reason i asked how long it had been fermenting is because temps are most important during the first stages of fermentation. It's when the yeast are the most aggressive and they are expelling lots of energy in the form of heat.

if the ambient temp was 75, your beer was probably fermenting in the high 80s at least.

But now that it's done, do what you can, and RDWHAHB

Right on, thanks for your help! This is only my 6th batch of beer to make, so I'm really starting to pay more attention to the process in hopes of more consistent beers. Just another lesson to put down on the notebook of "don't forget to" haha

I just asked my wife to check the beer and she said it's down to 70, yay!

Looks like the water bath did the trick - 66-68F all night. Got the ice packs ready for today, 80 in Indy.

Nice. Let us know how it turns out. Swamp coolers are a wonderful thing (until you get a chest freeze and a temp controller)

bump for outcome!

Ah, for the update - since the damage had already been done, the beer has a lot of "banana" flavor. I don't care for it at all. I still have 4 bottles left that I just haven't drank yet. It's too hard to throw away beer haha

sorry to hear.. i had a thermostat misbehave in my ferm chamber any my Black Rye IPA was fermenting waay too high for about 12 hours over the weekend. Came across this thread.. i hope there wasn't too much damage done.

It did get me off my ass to finally put together my STC-1000 thermostat build. $40 well spent.

Best of luck on your Black Rye IPA! Hopefully it won't suffer from the issue that my Pumpkin Beer did with the off flavors.

I stress temp control to all new brewers I talk to. It really is one of the most commonly overlooked parts of the process that is extremely important. You can have the best recipe in the world but if you don't handle the yeast right and give them the right fermentation temp... the beer is done!

I'll get the chance to sample tonight for my first round of dry hopping. I was very excited at how the stock thermostat was handling the temps.. then i decided to raise it ever so slightly overnight to get to 65 degrees. Turns out that was the point that disabled the compressor completely and instead of acting as a refridgerator, it acted as an insulator and the temps got up there. Lesson learned. My STC temp control is rocking away (fun project too!) and keeping the temps in line. Hopefully this is the last time I have to worry about it.

Tonight I should know more...

well.. i sampled tonight and couldn't detect any banana flavor but the rye/hops in this beer were pretty strong so that may have a lot to do with it. Lesson learned, if you're gonna screw up temporarily with ferm temps, do it on a beer with a lot of other flavors going on...