It's alive!

Well, I cooked up my first batch yesterday. After researching and reseaching, I developed my own recipe and went to work on what I hope to be a nice malty Scottish 70/-.

I did a DME, LME and specialty grain steep. Ran into a few problems that I learned from (details later) SWMBO has plans for me.

Anyway, I did a starter with White Labs Edinburg yeast and that was churning really well when I pitched it at about 8pm last evening. This morning, I've got Krausen, pleny of CO2 bubbling out of my blow off tube, and what looks like tens of thousands of little yeasties swirling around in there.

Now I pitched at 80 degrees and I've only got her cooled down to 68 degrees by this morning, I'm trying to get it down to 60 degrees with ice, water, wet t-shirt, and a AC vent piped down right on top of it. It may take me a total of 24-30 hours to get it down to 60.

Is this going to hurt the flavor of my ale?

Back later after dutys attended to.

From the White Labs site:

Edinburgh Ale
(WLP028)


Scotland is famous for its malty, strong ales. This yeast can reproduce complex, flavorful Scottish style ales. This yeast can be an everyday strain, similar to WLP001. Hop character is not muted with this strain, as it is with WLP002.
Attenuation: 70-75 †; Flocculation: Medium; Optimum Ferm. Temp: 65-70


60 F might be a bit too cool.. it'll probably slow the fermentation without bringing any benefits. 70 F or even 75 F has always worked fine for me. Just try to stay close to the optimum temp listed for your yeast strain. You'll have to ferment at fairly high temps before you risk off flavors. What is important though is that you pitch at or below 80 F and aerate the wort well when you do.

It's also probably not so great to be cooling the wort gradually after pitching.. the yeast will work best at stable temps. Of course, these points are really nit picking.. sounds like you're doing fine. Point is, I wouldn't worry so much about keeping quite that cold.

It's just that most of the recipies for Scottish ales using this yeast have recommended fermenting the Edinburg Ale yeast at 60 degrees to ensure the clean malty profile of a Scottish ale. There was an article in zymurgy just last month that recommended the same 60 degrees when using this yeast. It may not be optimum for the yeast as far as speed goes but it's supposed to help in the development of the flavor profile for Scottish ales.

It's 60 degrees and still working just fine right now. I'll keep an eye on it and will expect the primary firmentation to take a bit longer. This is the main reason I did a starter for this batch. I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of activity. I pitched the yeast at 80 degrees because that's what's most recommended and because my starter was at about 75 degrees.

I was just concerned about the fast propigation of the yeast and the warmer than targeted firmentation temps making the yeast produce flavors that I didn't want.

Thanks for the reassurances that the temps was within the range for the yeast.

I seriously doubt you'll have an overly fruity/estery taste.. perhaps if you were planning to enter the beer in a competition.. then maybe.. maybe you'd have reason to be concerned.

Don't sweat the small stuff.. it honestly amazes how badly I can screw something up and still end up with really really good beer. I haven't had a bad batch yet.. but I don't think I've had a single brew day where every single thing went as planned.