Should I bottle?---Need Help ASAP!!

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sjacobso76

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So a bit of an odd one here: I recently brewed Morebeer's Pliny the Elder clone, as the extract version. It ended up fermenting for a long time because I kept putting it off. It was about a month in the primary, then I dry hopped and racked to a secondary where it lived for two weeks. I used fermentation temp control for the first time as I just got it set up. I fermented the first 5 days at 64 degrees and then raised it up to 68 degrees.

Today I took it out of the temp control to get it ready to bottle. I got delayed in getting it into the bottle, and the temp raised up to about 80 degrees (it's really hot here!). Now there's a bunch of bubbles coming off of the fermenter! I dropped my hydro into the carboy and it's reading 1.012, so it should be done fermenting. Is this possibly just CO2 coming out of solution, or is fermentation taking place? I just don't want to ruin this great beer! Should I go ahead and prime and get it into the bottles, or should I give it some time at this high temp to finish out? Am I going to get a bunch of nasty flavors with it that high of a temp? I can't imagine it can do much since there can't be very much in the way of fermentables, but I'm not sure what to do. Help!

Sam
 
I'd bottle it. Warmer temps would make it vent CO2, and that's a long time to suddenly wake up.


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Solubility of CO2 in beer goes down as temps increase. If you've been raising the temp of the beer, I would fully expect a fair amount of CO2 to begin coming out of solution. If you're just seeing an airlock bubble, go ahead and bottle. If you're seeing visible and dramatic activity on the surface of the beer, you might reconsider and give it a couple more days.
 
CO2 coming out of solution as the temperature raises. At that FG, with that particular beer and given all the details you shared, it couldn't really be anything else. The only thing you might have to think about now is what temp to use for the "beer temperature" when calculating your priming sugar. Since you are literally watching your CO2 volume changing, you can be sure that you can no longer run a simple calculation to know what it is, until it reaches equilibrium.
 
So now it's too late for me to start a bottle operation, so I'm thinking I'll leave till morning and bottle it then. I'll just do my typical 4oz of priming sugar and roll with it. Thanks for the replies!
 
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