Has anyone done this...?

[cclloyd]

OK. So I have a chest freezer and a Johnson controller that I have been using for about a year and a half without issues other than my beer is better with the temp control. Yesterday I opened it up to check progress on my latest and my blow off tube on a batch of hefe that I pitched and sealed Friday night had gotten clogged and unseated the seal on the bucket so I had about a quarter inch of foam and yeast slurry in the bottom. No issues, I cleaned it up, sanitized a new lid and swapped it out - all is well. Except I forgot to put the temp probe for the JC back in the freezer. I get home from work tonight and realize I now have a hefe in the third day of primary and a Dead Guy clone that is 5 weeks in that are partially frozen.
The DG clone I'm pretty sure will be fine, just need to let it thaw and bottle it.
Here's my question - has anyone done this and what can I expect? I'm thinking the hefe (which has a beautiful thick layer of frozen krausen on the top) should re-start once the temp comes back up. If I swirl it up and get the temp back to 65*F or so it should start fermenting again and all will be well. I hope. As for the DG clone my only concern would be if too much yeast dropped out while it was that cold. Any input or ideas on this? Thanks for reading.

 

[Airborneguy]

You may have dead yeast in the Hefe. Straight freezing without taking laboratory steps will probably kill the yeast.

If you want, you can pull some of the ice out of the DG and have an Ice-DG clone, stronger, and possibly more malty than you intended, but still a perfectly normal beer. Otherwise, thawing it out before bottling/kegging should be fine, unless you planned on naturally carbing, which again, there may not be viable yeast for.

 

[cclloyd]

Yeah, the lack of viable yeast after freezing is my main concern. I have a couple sachets of dry yeast as spares. I think I'll let them come up to temp for a couple of days and see what happens. If the fermentation doesn't restart in the hefe I'll add a packet of US-05 to finish it out.
Is there any harm in adding a packet or partial packet to the DG clone at bottling time to ensure that it carbs up? I know that adding yeast at bottling is done by a lot of commercial breweries and from what I've read it's not uncommon when bottling homebrewed lagers. Any thoughts on this?

 

[cclloyd]

Well, the overwhelming response tells me that I may indeed be the only one who has made this particular error. Fear not, fellow brewers, after letting them thaw out - it took about 24 hours at 72*F - the hefe has krausen again (it fell entirely during the thaw) and is actively fermenting. Based on this I am going to bottle the DG clone and hope for the best with it carbing. This shows me that yeast are tougher than I thought and you have to try harder than that to kill them off.

 

[Krrazy]

Good Luck! I think I recall a Brewing Network podcast where John Palmer mentioned that he froze a lager and went through similar steps as you are but I don't have any personal experience. Your post will serve as a help to all those in the future!

 

[cclloyd]

A couple of interesting results from this. The hefe resumed fermentation and looks like it has finished out at 1.010. Tastes good and appears to be normal.

The DG clone is another story. I bottled it and it has sediment after 4 days so it appears to be carbing up ok. Here's the catch - when I tasted a sample before bottling all of the hop flavor and aroma was gone. I mean GONE. It still had an underlying hop bitterness but the flavor is extremely malt forward like a scotch ale or a marzen style. It didn't taste bad per se but it certainly wasn't what I had intended. I'm guessing that when it froze the resulting precipitate caused the hop particulates and compounds to drop out of suspension. Just a guess but it seems to be the case. Food for thought.