Irish ale Fermement question

Hi, i'm 24 hrs into an Irish ale fermentation. I had my ale at low 70's over night but eventually i got it down to about 68F today. It's currenty hovering at 67F or so and stable. I was hoping to ferment at 64F but now i'm not sure if i want to adjust my temperature even though i have added temperature control into my equation. I have heard too much variation in temp is not a good thing to have in your fermentation.

Should i just forget about my desired 64F and run it through at 67F?

Depending on your yeast. If your using an Irish ale yeast you wont have a problem. Might pick up a little fruitlyness but not to bad probably

It's probably too late to do much. If I could arbitrarily guess a number, I'd say 2/3 of your ester profile come from the first 24 hours after pitching. This is why pitch temp is so important.

I have a friend who pitches low, gets through the lag phase, and then about 12-24 hours of fermentation, and then ramps the temp up big time on his batches. He likes to finish quickly and really feels that he's not missing out on much by raising the temp.

Ya, that seems to make sense kanzimonson, thanks. I'm learning all about proper pitching techniques in my school of hard knocks over here. Would rather learn by others experiances, personally!

So what would an ideal pitch temp have been?

64F or less?

Are there any concerns if i was slightly above temp in the first 12 hours to take into consideration? ie, will i have off flavors that need more time for the yeast to take care of?

I pitch my ales between 62-65. Sometimes as high as 68, and that's pretty much when I'm getting lazy or impatient during chilling.

Put simply, the higher the temp that growth occurs, the more by-products the yeast produce. Towards the end of fermentation the yeast clean this stuff up, but the more they produce, the lower the likelihood they'll clean it ALL up.

So for example, I use an English ale yeast in most of my beers. When I make something that I want to have some yeasty esters, I'll pitch 65-68 and carry out most of fermentation at 68. This makes for a pretty powerfully flavored beer.

When I use this strain for an IPA, I'll pitch at 62 and conduct the first few days of fermentation at 63 or so. It will be a bit less malty this way (though still pretty malty just because of the strain).

In all cases, I'm always ramping up to 70-75 to clean up the beer.

As for your batch, you'll definitely want to raise the temp to clean up any by-products that were created at the beginning. It won't be terrible - just an estery beer. You may or may not like this, but now you know.

Good information. So 3 or 4 days into fermentation before turning up the temp? Do i want to ramp it up slowly, like a degree every 12 hours over a period of days?

I think the estery profile is actually what we have become accustomed to with this beer, this is actually the lowest temp i have pitched at!

24lb Marris otter
2lb chocolate malt
2lb crystal 120l
2lb roasted barley

1oz columbus
1oz cascade

My beers have all been very malty, i figured it was due to my higher mashing temp and under pitching of yeast. I mashed on the cooler end this time and made a 1.5 gallon yeast starter, so i was trying to see if it would finish a little lower.

Still trying to figure out what effects what. Luckily i have 3 or 4 beer styles i like well enough to keep trying over and over again, i make little mistakes along the way and so far all my beer has been drinkable!



My original intent on this batch was to get a ton of yeast for repitching into an imperial version of this. I'm worried that i hit my OG over 1.055 like i was aiming for, my OG was 1.07, hopefully my yeast wont be too stressed out after this.