Never had a ferment ramp the temp up this much before

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jmiracle

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I just did a partial-mash Irish Red yesterday, I guess I've taken a weird path in brewing because this was my first time using WLP001 Cal Ale yeast. I pitched a 2l starter into a 67 degree wort at 1 am last night, this morning the ferment was going great, already a good amount of Krausen, but the temp was pushing 76! In all my other batches I've never had a primary fermentation go so high.

2 Questions:

1. I used a cold water bath/wet t-shirt (not the cool kind) combo to cool it down with evaporation. When I checked about a half hour later it was down to 70 when unfortunately I had to go to class. Should I look into changing the water or using ice bottles or using a fan, or will just the water bath and T-shirt keep it cool enough? If it matters it's a glass carboy in a rubbermaid container of 5 gallons of cold water that reaches about half way up the carboy, and a wet t-shirt covering the rest.

2. Will the high temperatures already experienced contribute any off-flavors (about 8 hours or so at max) and if so is there any specific remedy?

Thanks very much for any help, like I said I don't know if I've just been lucky or what but I've never had a temperature problem up until this point.
 
You should be good with the wet t-shirt you're currently using. This should bring it back down to good levels for you. Regarding damage already done, probably not too much to worry about. You may notice a slightly higher amount of fruity esters, but that should also be taken care of by the yeast once they start consuming some of the byproducts of their own fermentation. Good luck!
 
Are you positive it was 67 the night before? Many times, even after a good amount of shaking/aerating, I've found my carboy to still have a temperature differential (bottom to top) if I added the extract wort and cold water separately. So maybe your initial reading was off, because ~10*F is a huge rise considering the fermentation is just getting started.

That said, that yeast ferments clean, so I doubt you're going to get off flavors
 
It's funny how quickly temps can rise though within the primary. For example, when brewing my last batch, I had the ambient temps in the room set to exactly 65F. However, when checking the temp inside the primary I came to find out that it ran anywhere from 5-10 degrees hotter inside the primary. I'm not a microbiologist, but I would imagine this extra heat is being caused by the fermentation and the reactions going on inside of the primary.
 
Are you positive it was 67 the night before? Many times, even after a good amount of shaking/aerating, I've found my carboy to still have a temperature differential (bottom to top) if I added the extract wort and cold water separately. So maybe your initial reading was off, because ~10*F is a huge rise considering the fermentation is just getting started.

That said, that yeast ferments clean, so I doubt you're going to get off flavors

I'm not positive, I dangled the probe for the digital thermometer down as far into the middle of the liquid as I could reach but it's always possible there was a differential. I had around 2.5-3 gallons of wort and topped off to five with water.
 
You will be fine with the swamp cooler as is. I would not worry about off flavors from that short a time period. It may be a bit more fruity than anticipated, but then again it may not. That is certainly not bad enough to loose sleep over.

Primary ferments can easily add 10º to ambient temps.

RDWHAHB

brew strong
 
add some ice cubes to the cold water bath every once in a while

ive had fermentations take place 12 degrees above room temperature- it all depends
 
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