Temperature stuff up

[rossbaker]

So, I stuffed up by leaving the temp probe out of the fermentation fridge when I put an extract wheat beer in there. This meant that the heat pad in the fridge kept firing whilst the temp on the rest of the garage stayed below the target temp. When I found out my mistake this morning the temp of the wort had reached 24 degrees and the fermenter felt pretty warm to the touch. The wheat beer was being brewed with Wb-06 and I also had a pale ale with us-05 that had been sitting on 18 deg for the past 5 days or so. I was planning on fermenting the wheat beer at 20 deg and finishing the ale off at that temp also.

Other than venting about my stuff up, I was wondering what people think I should now expect from these two brews. The pale ale had gotten down to about 1016 so it didn't have touch further to go. How funky will the us05 and the wb06 get after spending the night at the elevated temp?

 

[glenwal]

The pale ale will be fine, off flavors are generally thrown in the early stages, raising the temp towards the end can actually help clean up the beer (24 is a bit high, but not really out there)

The wheat beer will probably end up with some good banana esters (yumm), so really depends what you were hoping for out of it.

 

[Jack of all biers]

If your heat pad is under the bottom of your fermentor (ie under your yeast cake), make sure you take if off the heat pad Then when you check your next hydrometer reading, taste and smell the sample. If you have heated the yeast cake too high or for too long it could go bad and you will know. If your heat pad wasn't under the fermentor and your wort only got to 24C then as stated above, you should be fine.

 

[rossbaker]

Thanks for the feedback here guys. Glad to hear that the beers shouldn't be too stuffed. I was actually hoping to get a bit more banana from the wb06 this time so should be ok. Took a sample today and tasted/smelt pretty nice which was a relief. Heat pad is kept in the fridge door shelf and only heats ambient temp with no contact to fermenters so should be all good.

 

[Diesel80]

Ross, I normally pitch my cubes into fermenter at about 25-28 and set fridge to drop them. Helps the yeast get cracking early, and by the time they are ready to start making beer proper (after multiplication phase) wort has been down at 18 for a while.

if it was only 24 this morning, that would mean that it was not 24 all night.

All good!

Cheers,
D80

 

[real_beer]

Stuffed up or learned something too watch out for next time? Live and learn, it's if you do it again you should kick yourself!

Before all the temperature controlled gear hit the home brew market lots of fermenters temperatures bounced around like a excited kid on a trampoline due to hot days, cold nights, or heating & air conditioning systems in a home. With all that most of the beers still turned out okay. But overall your always much better off brewing at a slightly higher temperature than you might want too, than bouncing it up and down all the time.