11 replies to this topic

[MtnBrewer]

...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.

[positiveContact]

that's too bad but at least you realized prior to the dry hopping.

[HVB]

I ferment in a wine fridge and I have 2 separate controllers for heating and cooling.  One on the fermenter to heat and one on fht fridge to cool.  On more than one occasion I have been trying to cold crash and forget to adjust the heating controller so the two end up fighting each other.  I now keep a taped note on both to make sure the other is set right.

 

Sounds like yours was an expensive and time consuming starter.

[SchwanzBrewer]

I did the same thing on my last batch of DCRIPA, but it only got up to 75 and that was on day 3. Beer turned out OK, but not as good as I'd hoped. Combine that with the sparge from hell and that beer was a mother fecker.

[denny]

There is a reason I keep 1450 in the low-mid 60s and you've found it.....sorry.

[BlKtRe]

That's a crappy story. 

[djinkc]

I've done that with the EHLT.  Went to the basement ready to mash in one morning and it was boiling over instead of holding at my strike temperature.  Minor inconvenience compared to a fermenter problem like that.

[cavman]

Control is in my hands though I like the idea of a temp controlled system. But spending the day manually doing everything having a few is how I like it.

[MtnBrewer]

That's a crappy story. 

 

Sorry to disappoint.

[BlKtRe]

Sorry to disappoint.

 

Meaning what happened was crappy. 

[MtnBrewer]

I know. 

 

At least it's one mistake I'll never make again.

[MyaCullen]

I

 

At least it's one mistake I'll never make again.

you say that now