Wyeast 1214 observations

[gio]

I'm in the process of making a belgian dubbel (ommegang abbey clone) with Wyeast 1214. It's in the secondary now.

I read that Ommegang likes to ferment their beers at fairly high temperatures (up into the 80's and they claim to hit 90 once and still got a good beer). Also the recipe I used said to ferment at 76-84 or something like that.

But now I'm reading all these threads that if Wyeast 1214 ferments too warm above the low-70s it produces a lot of horrible banana esters.

I fermented warm. In fact, I actually used a space heater to directly warm my fermenter because it was cold in my apartment! The wort began in the high-60s/low-70s and fermentation started within 12 hours. It fermented vigorously for 2-3 days, slowed on the 4th and completely stopped by the end of the 4th. At that point my SG had gone from 1.072 to 1.014. I left it in the primary for 3 more days (7 total) with a space heater keeping it at about 78-80 degrees during that time.

From what I've read this should have produced some horrible banana esters, but it tastes fine so far and the smell coming from the fermenter was wonderful.

Here is why I think I might be ok:
1) I pitched 2 smack packs of 1214 that I gave plenty of time to swell, so I pitched probably around 11-12 million cells/ml, definitely not underpitching.
2) My temperature started off low, in the high 60s and didn't really above 74 or so until after the first couple of days. People claim most esters are produced very early on in fermentation. Gradually raising the temperature of fermentation seems to be an established technique and maybe it actually helped the yeast clean up some of the off flavors. I could be completely wrong here, someone correct me if I'm wrong.
3) The recipe included a lot of sugar and I'm cold conditioning in the secondary at about 40-44 degrees. I'm not sure if either of these helped or hurt the ester issue.

 

[BigB]

Read "Brew Like a Monk." Its a great read on the history of Belgian brewing and gives lots of information as to how the Belgians do it. Many of those breweries do ferment warm and let them ramp up in termperature on their own. And many have experienced the same thing that you did, that sometimes a really high fermentation temp doesn't affect anything. Now keep in mind that the people that say the yeast can throw off lots of banana esters are also right. It is just a matter of what you are brewing and what you are looking to achieve. Further, some people are really sensitive to that ester and don't like it in larger quantities. There is nothing wrong with that, just that it serves as a warning to others who also don't want that flavor.

 

[rocketman768]

Keep in mind that large breweries can and do ferment much higher than homebrewers because the hydrostatic pressure in those huge fermentation tanks allows them to do so without creating off-flavors.

 

[gio]

Yup, I've been reading Brew Like a Monk. That's were I've gotten a lot of my information from.