TANSTAAFB said:
<EXPERIMENT RESULTS> derka derka derka mohammed jihad </EXPERIMENT>
I wonder how the results would turn out in a double-blind triangle test. Although I'm guessing it would turn out similar to the not-so-scientifically-rigorous experiment you did, with a slight difference only noticeable by direct comparison. If noticeable at all.
And I like experimenting in as controlled a manner as possible and reading research articles and published with the aim of perfecting my process and making beers that are the best I can possibly brew, but I'm largely satisfied with your more casual kitchen-experiment and really don't expect to pursue this issue much further.
Why? Because, if there isn't a significant improvement when the only difference between two otherwise identical beers is that one is kept temp-controlled the entire time, and the other only for the first week or so during active fermentation (ignoring the processes of lagering and cold-conditioning), then it simply isn't worth investing in such capabilities, and I think almost any commercial brewery making over a dozen styles each year (especially those that don't use the same house yeast strain for every single one) would probably agree.
For a number of reasons, I haven't really brewed in about 3.5 months (I'll be starting back up this weekend with a lambic), but usually brew 2-3 times per month, most often 3. Except for a few exceptions, my beers stay in primary for a minimum of 4 weeks, with an average (if ignoring the sours) of perhaps 6 weeks. So at any given time, it's not unusual for me to have 5 beers in fermentors simultaneously (again, ignoring sours), and sometimes even more if I've brewed something huge like a RIS, IPA, barleywine, etc.
But even with just 5 at once, it would be very expensive to accommodate. Yeast is very sensitive to temperature, as we all know, and a beer fermented at 64° is often noticeably different from a beer fermented even 1 or 2 degrees higher or lower. So I'm very particular about the temperature my beer actively ferments at, and refuse to compromise. Since I generally don't brew more than once a week, I can get away with just a single temp-controlled fermentation chamber by letting my beets stay in there for a week or two, and simply move it to my cellar when I need the ferm chamber for a new batch (or some place warmer, sometimes with a brew-belt, if I'm trying to really dry a beer out).
BUT, if I wanted to keep temp control for the entire time I have a beer in the fermentor, since I'm so picky about precise temperatures (meaning I refuse to compromise on a fermentation temperature just so I can stick two different beers in the same chamber), I would need at least 5 ferm chambers, which, as I mentioned before, is a really wasteful investment if it doesn't produce significant improvements. And since everything points to the fact that it doesn't, this isn't really something I care to investigate further, because it's almost certain that the difference is either minor and only noticeable when tasted side by side with an otherwise identical beer, or the difference is not noticeable at all - and because both those possibilities would result in me STILL NOT investing in more than 1 or 2 ferm chambers, the precise answer is, in practice, irrelevant to me.