Fermentation chamber went haywire...temps went over 100 degrees?

[ChaddyWa]

So I left to go on vacation over this past weekend and came home only to find my chest freezer / fermentation chamber at 115 degrees inside. Yikes! Apparently before I had left, I had unplugged it to get to the attic and when I re-hooked up the inkbird, I must have switched the heating and cooling plugins. Best guess it was like this for 3-4 days. Beer had been fermenting for about 10 days until that point. How bad do you think this is going to taste? It’s a lemon lime Hefeweizen / summer shandy clone. Hoping the yeast had already done most of their work by that point, but clearly I’m worried about high esters / fusel alcohols.

 

[RPh_Guy]

How bad do you think this is going to taste?

Pretty bad, unless fermentation was already finished.

 

[seatazzz]

I just went through a similar situation; my ferment fridge futzed out with a lager going inside. Highest recorded temperature (for a lager that was supposed to be cold-fermented) was 82°. And that was only when I got home, it may have got higher during the day. I'm sipping on it now, turned out just fine.

You won't know until you try. For a Hefe, you will probably have more pronounced banana-ish flavor/aroma, and maybe some sulfur as well, that also depends on the yeast you used. For the most part, primary fermentation is usually done within 5 days, after that the yeast are just cleaning up after their wild party. If you don't get any autolysed yeast off-flavors (trust me, you will know if you have them), I would get it packaged up posthaste.

Yeasts are hardy creatures, otherwise they wouldn't have lasted as long as they have. Some strains can take some extreme temperature fluctuations and still produce great beer.

Taste it! That's the only way you will know.

 

[RPh_Guy]

She's right. It should have finished by 10 days. If that's the case I'll probably be OK.

Actually fermenting at 115°F would be a different story.

 

[ChaddyWa]

Thanks ya’ll. I’ll give it a taste this weekend and see what happens.