...if you know what to do with it.
So here's the story. Brew Dogs recently released all of their recipes and I decided to give their Punk IPA a go. I needed a good beer to clean out some of the hops in my freezer. I brewed the beer, no problems, and pumped it into the fermenter. The fermenter is a heated & cooled conical. The recipe said to ferment at 66°F and my basement is currently about 63° so I set the heater to come on at 64° and the cooler to come on at 68°. The temperature is monitored by a probe that goes into a thermowell down the middle of the conical which clamps on with a tri-clamp. The morning after brewing I dumped the trub that had settled overnight and pitched the yeast. To do so I have to undo the tri-clamp at the top and pull the thermowell, which I did. Later that day I went down to check on it and it's cranking away already. Must have been a fresh batch of yeast.
For the next three days, it's fermenting like a beast. The amazing thing was that the temperature was in the low 60's. That seemed odd because of how I set the temp control but somehow that didn't set off any alarm bells in my head. On the 4th day while I was checking on it, I discovered why when I noticed the temperature probe looped over the control box and not down in the thermowell where it should have been. It had been fermenting with the heater running full tilt boogie for 3-4 days. I put the probe into the thermowell and as I saw the temperature rise, my heart went in the other direction. It finally stopped at 83°F. If I had used a saison yeast, I could have just called it a Belgian IPA but I'm here to report that Denny's Favorite 50 doesn't appreciate those sorts of temperatures.
Even so, it wasn't as bad as I had feared but not good enough to continue with. It still needed quite a bit of dry hops and so I decided to cut my losses and dump it. However it seemed like the yeast was still in reasonable shape so I brewed another batch and reused that yeast. This time I made damn sure what temperature it fermented at.
Maybe I need a BrewPi.