Cold..well freezing cold secondary

[robinsond]

Alright so here's what happened:

My beer was doing quite well, an evil twin extract kit from northern brewer. Fermented happily at 66-67 degrees for about 12 days. The hop material, crozien I think I heard it be called fell back in so I decided to transfer into secondary like the instructions said.

I recently bought a Johnson control unit and a used chest freezer to control fermentation temperature which has been working like a charm. When I transferred the wort, I forgot to put the probe back in to the freezer and so the controller was reading 73 degrees and flipped the freezer on. It was only going for about 2.5-3 hours but the freezer dropped to around 20...the beer not as cold but cooled down significantly. Is this horrible for the finished beer? Should I expect off flavors or bad beer?

I'm defrosting the freezer and will return the uncarbonared beer back when it reaches an appropriate temperature.
Sorry for the novel I just don't want it to be ruined. Thanks for any and all help!

Cheers,

Dave

 

[shawnbou]

I don't think the beer was ruined. The freezing likely killed most of the yeast, but since the primary fermentation was done (the krauesen had fallen) the beer should be fermented.

There may not be enough live yeast to condition the beer to perfection, or to carbonate it if you're bottling, but yeast can be pretty hearty little creatures sometimes. I've read an estimate by John Palmer than roughly 20% of your yeast should remain active if the carboy freezes, but your mileage may vary.

Let it thaw out and continue to secondary it as planned, then bottle it. To be safe, you may want to add 1/3-1/2 packet of dry yeast to the cooled priming sugar solution at bottling time - S-04 or Notty should give good results.

 

[robinsond]

Ok thank you for the reassurance! I'll get some yeast for the bottling process and do what you said.

Thanks

 

[Johnnyhitch1]

In essence you "cold crashed" which is a good thing for the secondary to help drop out yeast/hops

Only time you can "damage" the beer is during high fermentation. Even after the first 2-3 days its pretty hard to ruin a beer.

Cheers!

 

[Johnnyhitch1]

Ok thank you for the reassurance! I'll get some yeast for the bottling process and do what you said.

Thanks

Unless you secondary for over a month, which you shouldn't, youll have plenty of yeast in suspension for carbing. You don't want to much trub/yeast at the bottom of your bottles.

 

[jro238]

Krausen.

Yeah, I wouldn't suggest doing this again but your beer will be OK. If the beer had actually frozen then a lot of your yeast would have died (freezing expands water in cells which lyses them).

In the future, I would suggest leaving your beer in primary for at least 10-14 days (depending on style) regardless of when the krausen falls. It is true that the majority of fermentation is finished at this point, but almost all beer will benefit from being left on the yeast cake for a little longer. I personally don't use secondaries unless I am adding fruit to a beer, but I would probably wait until I had steady hydrometer readings for a few days before I transfered.