Fastest fermentation yet

[worlddivides]

Most beers I brew ferment in 3-5 days, usually closer to 3 days. I've had a few finish in as little as 48 hours, especially with some English and Belgian strains. But I just brewed a beer with an OG of 1.056 that had machinegun airlock activity and I had to put 4 two-liter bottles of ice to keep it within a reasonable fermentation temp range. And then just suddenly, all airlock activity stopped and it stopped giving off heat. I believe this might be the fastest fermentation I've ever had. The fermentation basically finished within 24-30 hours. So it feels so weird that I'm basically waiting 2 weeks of seemingly no fermentation before packaging. Now, I do imagine it probably fell a few more points after that first 24 hours, but it's been 4 days since I pitched the yeast and I'm pretty sure it's at its final gravity. I just don't want to waste 250ml of beer for a gravity sample until at least 7 days have passed, even with such a fast fermentation. It's making me tempted to bottle sooner than 2 weeks. For some further info, the fermentation started at 66F (18.5C) and ended at 68F (20C). It's not the most violent fermentation I've had. That would probably go to WLP530 Abbey Ale yeast, which plugged my airlock with krausen multiple times. But that had airlock activity for quite a few days, as far as I can remember.

Anyone ever had an active fermentation that ended faster than 24-36 hours?

 

[day_trippr]

I don't think I've ever had a batch go quiet in fewer than 5 full days from the pitch - and even that is very unusual for the yeast strains I typically use. Most brews take a good 10 days for the krausen to fall. But all my ferments are under tight temperature control the whole way.

What is your usual batch size?

 

[mashdar]

S-04 krausen drops in ~48 hours for me. The only Belgian strains I use are 3787 and 3724, both take a little longer.

What yeast was it? And what style?

If it ran hot, a few extra days might hopefully clean up fusels/aldehydes/etc.

 

[worlddivides]

I don't think I've ever had a batch go quiet in fewer than 5 full days from the pitch - and even that is very unusual for the yeast strains I typically use. Most brews take a good 10 days for the krausen to fall. But all my ferments are under tight temperature control the whole way.

What is your usual batch size?

13 liters (about 3 gallons packaged). I definitely wasn't say it was ready to package as soon as the airlock activity ended (I'm still planning on bottling 2 weeks after yeast pitch). I'm sure there were still several more gravity points left to ferment and it still needed to clean up. If I had to guess, probably 95% of the fermentation was done within 24-30 hours, but I don't have a Tilt or Rapt in there to check.

 

[worlddivides]

S-04 krausen drops in ~48 hours for me. The only Belgian strains I use are 3787 and 3724, both take a little longer.

What yeast was it? And what style?

If it ran hot, a few extra days might hopefully clean up fusels/aldehydes/etc.

Yeah, S-04 is usually about 48 hours for me too. This was Windsor, which I've used before, but never on its own (so far always combined with something else), for a London porter.

I have a temperature prob in a thermo-well, so I was able to make sure it never ran hot, but I did have to put 4 two-liter ice bottles in my temperature chamber at one point to keep the temperature from rising. Even then, though, with a full 8 liters of ice in there, the fermentation temperature at the time just dropped from 68F to 66.5F.

It's also interesting because normally the temperature difference between the probe and the temperature stickers on the outside of my fermenter is only about 1F (which could be on each side of it, depending on whether the heat of fermentation making the probe higher or the ice bottle being close to the sticker making it lower), but this time, there was a full 4F difference with the sticker reading 64F at the time the probe read 68F.