Yikes! Temperature control question

[je52rm]

So My house heater broke and it's supposed to get down to 35•-40• tonight and I'm worried about the temp of my 5-gallon carboy brews (ESB and Graff/hard cider). I imagine the internal house temp may get down to the 50's• and I am wondering if it's gonna affect the fermentation activity and if so what should I do to help it along? I will have heat again in a couple days and it will be back at the 65•-70• temp. This isn't gonna ruin/affect the batches is it?

 

[Yooper]

There are a couple of things you can do, depending on how much effort you want to put into it! One is just to throw some towels around the fermenters, or heavy blankets. That will insulate the beer so that it takes a lot longer for the temperature to drop. If it's going to be a while, you could try a water bath. Just stick the fermenters into coolers and add water up to the beer level. That will insulate the beer even more, as it'll take even longer for the temperature of that much water and beer to drop, and if it does drop too much you can add a couple cups of boiling water to the water bath when needed. I'd just float a thermometer in the water bath to check the temp. You could toss a heavy blanket over the cooler set up, too, to help insulate it.

 

[bighorn_brew]

Wrap wrap wrap with whatever you got, and it probably won't drop down that much, if your heater is fixed tomorrow no worries. What yeast strains are you using?

 

[je52rm]

The ESB is a whiteLabs WLP013 London ale yeast(liquid)
The Graff is Safale-05 dry yeast

Forgot to add the ESB is 13 days in and the Graff is 5 days in