• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

Fermentation Temp Question

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

jblack138

Active Member
Joined
Feb 22, 2015
Messages
32
Reaction score
2
I've read several "Too Cold To Ferment" threads on here & have seen many responses to temps, but there's one thing I haven't quite grasped yet.

Ambient room temps for Ales should range from the 60s to low/mid 70s, depending on brand. During the fermentation process the temp inside your fermenter will raise, possibly as much as 10 degrees.

For the sake of my question, let's say my fermenting space ambient temp is 74° & the max temp suggested for the yeast is 75°. Will the temp inside the fermenter cause the yeast to ferment too warm & produce any problems with the beer?
 
For the sake of my question, let's say my fermenting space ambient temp is 74° & the max temp suggested for the yeast is 75°. Will the temp inside the fermenter cause the yeast to ferment too warm & produce any problems with the beer?

Yes, in general that is exactly what would happen.

I've personally seen active fermentations push the temperature of the fermenting beer to 10 degrees above ambient. When fermentation slows, and activity wanes a bit, the temperature becomes much closer to ambient temperatures.

For ales, usually an ambient temperature of 62-64 degrees is a good guess.

You can buy those 'stick on' thermometers (called fermometers) that can tell the temperature at a glance. If your room is over 68 degrees, the fermenter can be placed in a water bath in a cooler, with an ice bottle or two inside the water to hold the temperature in a more desirable range.
 
Thanks for the quick reply!

I'm on my second beer & my ambient temp hasn't been that warm. My first ambient temp was in the 66-68 range. This new beer that's fermenting is sitting in the 64° range.

Definitely be keeping this in mind when the weather starts to warm up.

Thanks again!
 
Thanks for the quick reply!

I'm on my second beer & my ambient temp hasn't been that warm. My first ambient temp was in the 66-68 range. This new beer that's fermenting is sitting in the 64° range.

Definitely be keeping this in mind when the weather starts to warm up.

Thanks again!

Personally I think even an ambient temp of 64 is too warm, especially for a clean American ale yeast. You should think about a method for chilling it. During the initial fermentation I would never have my fridge ambient temp set any higher than 55. At least in my experience, keeping fermenting wort nice and cool is THE MOST important part of the process! Cheers
 
Oh yeah? Well I like to set mine at 45! :)

No I don't. If you put your fermenter in a party tub filled with water in the mid 60's you should be fine. Add frozen water bottles as needed. Eventually, get an old fridge or freezer and a temp controller with probe taped to the outside of the fermenter. Put a little insulation over the probe and maintain mid 60's.

Unless you're using lager yeast, you shouldn't need to maintain mid 50s, IMHO.
 
So for the ambient temp control, (i.e. party tub, fridge, etc.) how long would you keep these lower temps for?

Party tub is my best option at the moment. So would I keep lower temp until bubbling stopped & then let unassisted ambient temp take over for the rest of fermintation or keep it cooler than my room temp for all of primary?
 
I increase temp a little at the end of active fermentation, and then hold there for at least a week. The increase doesn't affect much though, I think. It is more important to not let temp decrease, or yeast will drop out and limit attenuation.
 
JB What yeast are you using? Usually after 5 days you can let the temps rise slowly to 70ish depending on the yeast.
 
My first batch was Lallemand Nottingham Danstar. This new batch is Safale S-05.
 
With S-05 try to keep the first 5 days above 65 or a Ideal 68 after that it can finish at 70 for a week or more!:)
 
Cold Iowa winter, I have four buckets at different places around the house to keep proper temps. Lager in the mud room, Ales in the kitchen, basement and living room.
It's like an Easter egg hunt. Love the cold will be doing 5 gal. a week till spring.
D
 
It depends on what you mean by "problems". Will it be the same as if you had the temp "locked down" at say 68F? No, it won't. Generally you'll get more estry by products the warmer you ferment. It may be what you want, or not.

In my limited experience with temperature experiments, in general if the ambient temperature is within the temperature range tolerance of the yeast, you don't (or at least I never have) get issues with "bad" fermentation byproducts. Even if the fermentation itself pushes the temp above the range.

That said, more estry may not be what you are looking for, in which case this is a bad thing. I've done lagers in the low 60's with just ambient brewing (using S-23) and the resulting beer was just fine. It was not quite as clean as I would have really loved, I could notice a bit of estriness, but it was mild. I've done ales in the mid-70's and they also turned out okay, but it isn't necessarily "the best" depending on the style of beer you are brewing.

Part of why I finally converted a mini fridge and built a temp controller so I could properly control the temps of my fermentation to better hit the exact style and results I am looking for (primary reason is so I can really do lagers now).

Just using a stick on thermometer, I've never noticed temps spike 10F above ambient (maybe one stuck down in would be slightly more accurate, but I can't think it would be by a whole lot). The most I've seen is around 3-4F during the most active period of fermentation. That said, my fermenters sit on my concrete slab. Generally ambient might be (in the winter time) 66F in my basement, slab temperature of 63F and I might see 66-67F during the most active part of fermentation with most of my beers according to the stick on thermometer. In the summer time it tends to go a little higher than that (maybe because the warmer temps mean more active fermentation?) where it might be 72F on the slab, 75F ambient and I might see 77-78F temps during the most active parts of fermentation.

I have deffinitely experienced "too cold to ferment" because of this though.

Two of the three times I've used Windsor ale yeast were this past fall when my basement and slab had already reached "winter" temps (it was mid-November and early December when I brewed with it). 63F slab temp mind you. Temp range is supposedly 64-70F on Windsor. Both brews ended up having incomplete fermentation. I just thought that the yeast somewhat underattenuated both times, because it wasn't terribly far under what I would have expected as the attenuation range. Both beers carbed up fine at first, but after around 4 weeks, both massively overshot their carbonation. At a guess, around 5-6 volumes for one and around 4 volumes for the other.

Doesn't take much extra fermentable sugars. I bottled both after 2 weeks and 10 days in the fermenter and as near as I could tell gravity had stabalized.

I just think it either needed to be fermented slightly warmer, especially at the end of fermentation or given an extra week or two. Or a bit of both.

The perils of fermenting below the temperature range (I pitched both at 78F and let natural heat loss bring the temps down, which took maybe 6-8hrs to hit about 65F with active fermentation being noticable at that point as well). So it probably "self warmed" enough to keep it in the proper range, but when active fermentation died down it ended up getting "too cold" and the yeast went dormant.

Especially since my thermostat runs at 66F during the day time in my basement, but 63F at night, the slab doesn't heat up or cool off very fast, but it still might have been enough to push the slab temp from 63F down to 62F each night.
 
Unless you're using lager yeast, you shouldn't need to maintain mid 50s, IMHO.

Thanks to the record-breaking cold temperatures the last couple of weeks, my wife's first batch of homebrew has been fermenting at around 55 with absolutely no input or effort from us. Gotta say, I'm kinda jealous.

She's using the WLP029 German Ale/Kolsch yeast. It'll either come out really well, or be a total gong show.

I should've gotten myself some more materials and brewed again. Temps are supposed to be back around normal again later this week.
 
Geography

Depending on where you live, passive control of fermentation temperature can be very easy or next to impossible.

In Texas with no basement and wild day to day temperature swings there is no good substitute for a fermentation chamber of sorts. A swamp cooler would be the next best option but requires more babysitting and you still need to make ice for it periodically.

A chest freezer (mine is 7.1cu ft), a heat source and an STC-1000 controller are a great investment if you have the space and means. Total is approx $300

Chest Freezer.jpg


Lasko Heater.jpg


STC 1000.jpg


DSC02048.jpg
 
Geography

Depending on where you live, passive control of fermentation temperature can be very easy or next to impossible.

In Texas with no basement and wild day to day temperature swings there is no good substitute for a fermentation chamber of sorts. A swamp cooler would be the next best option but requires more babysitting and you still need to make ice for it periodically.

A chest freezer (mine is 7.1cu ft), a heat source and an STC-1000 controller are a great investment if you have the space and means. Total is approx $300

This^

Have basically the same setup. Only difference is mine is a GE Chest freezer. This is the way to go. I just set it and forget it.
 
Back
Top