Fermenting in the desert

Hello all,

I recently got transferred to the great city of Phoenix and the current temperature is 106°. Besides this being too hot for a human civilization to exist, it can't be good for beer fermentj g. In order to keep my electric bill below $300. I typically do not lower my AC past 80°. Has anyone had success with their beer fermenting with a temperature that high before?

Thank you for your help.

I live in Santa Fe and while not 106* it was well over 80* in my house for most of my recent fermentation. I created a water bath to put my carboy in and regulated the temperature by the number of frozen water bottles I put in it. I managed to keep my temperatures around 62-66* fairly consistently doing it this way.

Here are some pictures to show you how I did it.

^^ This, called a swamp cooler in these parts and works great. Not to mention really cheap!

What celticdevildog posted is generally referred to as a swamp cooler. You can tell pretty easy how it works just by looking at it. Freeze water bottles and replace as necessary. One issue with these is it is possible to go too cold with them, and you really don't have much temperature control, you are just cooling it down.

Another option is to buy a cheap freezer off Craigslist, then hook up an aquarium temperature controller to it. You can usually get freezers off CL for <$60, the temp controllers (if buying Chinese ones off eBay, like mine) are ~$20. It's a little pricier, but it does give you fine control of the temp. This is what I do, but I did have a free freezer. The cost of electricity is negligible, since most newish freezers run mayb $20 per year, and you are keeping it about 60* higher than that. The other nice thing about them, is the simplicity, since you don't have to create a box or anything, just buy a temp controller, wire it up and you're done.

The big thing is do whatever works for you. All you need is something that cools and a box. People use air conditioners, dorm fridges, etc. attach them to an insulated box, with a temp controller, and use that.

Here are just a few examples:
Dorm Fridge - https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-mini-fridge-fermentation-chamber-build-256068/
Freezer - https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/another-fermentation-chamber-build-419917/

Why, yes. Yes I have.

Make a wet t-shirt swamp cooler with a fan blowing over it, and that should get you, in Phoenix humidity, 10 degF.

The yeasts with high temperature profiles include most Belgian and Saison yeasts, as well as:
Fermentis US-05 = Wyeast 1056 = WLP001
Fermentis S-04 = Wyeast 1098 or 1099 = WLP007
Fermentis T-58
Fermentis S-33
Wyeast 1187 Ringwood = WLP005 British
Wyeast 1318 London 3
Wyeast 1332 Northwest
Wyeast 1335 British 2 = WLP025 Southwold
Wyeast 1728 Scottish = WLP028 Edinburgh
Wyeast 1010 American wheat
WLP008 East coast
WLP023 Burton

I've used a few of these myself, using a swamp cooler arrangement, and although I've gotten more fruitiness than maybe would be ideal, the results have still been good.

Or you could build a fermentation chamber.

I stared brewing this year with house temps @ 78. The results were excellent. Noone on this forum believed me. In fact they convinced me to transform an industrial freezer to a fermentation chamber. That's fine, however I still made great beer at room temp.

My house stays between 75-80 degrees. If I cool the wort to 60 degrees and allow the temp to rise naturally I will have good beer. Only the first few days are important, and allowing the temp to rise over the course of a couple days really does have great results IMO.

I was going to suggest a small fridge with a temp controller. However most of us cant just drop the cash on that so the above options look good. How about different yeast strains that perform well at temps around 80? Make warmer beers in the summer and the cooler ones in the winter?
I have made some good brew in the heat of summer but they were not as good as I feel they could have been if the yeast were kept in their happy temp zone.

GL + HF

Some of the Belgian strains claim to operate pretty happily at 80 F.

As mentioned, a swamp cooler (the wet t-shirt and a fan kind), which operates by evaporation, will work really well in your low humidity.