BIABrewer.info

Hi,

So I have two brews that were happily fermenting away. I Planned to bottle this weekend as had reached the 2 week mark. However, I took my eye off the ball, not realizing that we were to experience some pretty hot weather. Came home from work on Thursday only to see that my fermenter temps were up around the 33 degree C mark!!

Is my beer ruined? Is it worth bottling?

Cheers,

Lee

Now is the time when kegs reallllyy come into there own.

Agree Lylo! Hoping to get set up with kegs in the next couple of months. I find the whole bottling process to be a complete PITA! Just had a peek in the fermenters and they smell ok. Just gonna bottle and see how they turn out

Bit of a bummer BBM but Id crack on and bottle. The majority of the fermentation has been completed and you were ready to bottle anyway so I think no real harm would have been done. Just allow for the lower residual carbonation when calculating your priming sugar.



Yeasty

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the first few days are the most critical. After 2 weeks, I'd say your probably OK, any off flavors may take a bit to condition out after bottling but you should certainly not dump it.

---Todd

That's great news! I was thinking that the yeast cake would be active for some reason. Yeasty, when you say does that mean that I'd need more or less priming sugar?

Thanks again for the quick responses all!

BBM

When your brew ferments some of the co2 stays in solution. the amount depends on the max temperature the brew has been at. The higher the temp the more sugar you will need to prime to a certain level as more of the co2 would have come out of the solution.

I use a calculator like this Priming Calculator

I'm betting all will be fine if, as the guys mentioned, your early fermentation was under control. There was a good podcast recently on BeerSmith I think on barley wines that said how a year of conditioning can be completely avoided by starting fermentation low and then bumping it gradually right up. It was an interesting podcast.

[Yeasty beat me to it again so excuse any repetition below .]

As for the priming, you'll have to make a judgment call here. For example, if you believe the brew had CO2 percolating through it for several days at 33 C then you will have to use more priming sugar. Without knowing anything more, maybe set your temp in the priming calculator to 25 C as a compromise?

I see Yeasty has just posted a Priming Calculator. I'd go for the one I've attached here though as it uses the same formulas as the BIABacus. (The 'Bottles Req' fields don't show up in this spreadsheet but are not necessary. If you do want those fields to work, you'll need to download the pre-release.)

Awesome, just about to begin bottling - thanks for the help I'll say it again, the level of support on this site in unbelievably awesome. Enjoy the weekend

Sorry about this Brewbagman but i have a question for PP that is marginally on topic;

PP - i seem to remmeber reading one of your posts a while back about conditioning at higher temps, akin to red wine accelerated aging. Was it some lager that may have got up to 60 Deg or so?
Did you ever find any truth in that (you may have said you would try an experiment)?

If you have a short/quick answer i owuld like to hear it, or if it needs more explanation, could you add it to the experimentation section?

Cheers

Sorry mally, totally missed your question until now sorry.

I know exactly what you are talking about . Just had a search of my posts with 'lager red wine' in them and four came up straight away. The first one is here but there would be more before that.

What struck me in this post is that it is one of many experiments I'd love to do but still haven't found the time to .

(The lager that traveled across Australia for many weeks, sometimes at over at over 60 C (140 F), was great. The ale, that I think was in a leaky keg, nearly killed me when I tasted it ).

So many things for us to explore mally ,
PP