Beer Forum

Hey guys, I have had a wheat beer fermenting about two weeks. About two days ago it was fermenting just fine at 78 degrees. Today it was at 87. I think my fermenter is fried. My concern is for my beer. I have it in my house cooling at the moment. Do I need to be super concerned about high alcohol flavors or other off flavores? I used WLP001 yeast with a healthy starter. The primary fermentation was definitely finished, so maybe I will get away with minimal off flavors? What do you guys think?

If you had the main fermentation at a reasonable temperature (78 seems kind of high) and it was finished up then the fact that it got hot probably won't be too terrible. 87 is very warm, but if the yeast was all finished up then I doubt you will have hurt it too much considering the relatively short time that it was hot.

My concern would be more with the 78 degree ferment. Was the primary ferment at that temperature, or did you have it low for most of primary and it had just gotten up that high after it was done?

Are you going to bottle it or keg it? As it cools down, it is going to pull in air and could end up getting oxygen into the beer. If you are kegging, I would get it into the keg asap and put CO2 on it. If you are bottling, then I would get it into the bottles so the little yeast activity that occurs during carbonation can scrub out the oxygen that has/will get in there.

I'm sure that it will be fine, Cal Ale yeast is pretty forgiving.

Oops. I meant 68 not 78. Yeah, I am gonna keg it. I will probably keg it next week.

Well, that sounds much better. You might consider naturally carbonating the keg with some priming sugar to scrub out the O2 you might have picked up when cooling down from that high temp. Then again, if it is going to get consumed fast then maybe just never mind that and drink it up.

If you are going to keg it, then just be sure to purge your keg prior to racking your beer in. That will help to minimize oxidation concerns.

I am glad you were fermenting it at 68F and not 78F. At 78, I would think you probably would have some extra esters and possibly some higher alcohols (fusels) depending on the OG of your wort. But, like Nate said, Cal ale yeast is fairly forgiving.
No worries with your beer getting up to 87F providing primary fermentation was all done and at 10 days + then you should be more than done (especially with cal ale). While it is not ideal to let it rise that high, with the bulk of fermentation done, the yeast should just be conditioning the beer at this stage and not actively producing any fermentation byproducts (diacetyl, esters, phenolics, alcohol, etc).

Yeah you should be good dude. Maybe more estery than you wanted? Let us know what you find out.

When you say your fermenter is fried, what are you using for a chamber? How are you controlling temps?