IIPA, first brew questions...

[jspain3]

It's been about 10 days since I brewed my first batch of beer, a IIPA kit from Brewer's Best, and the wort has been in the primary ever since. .

Unfortunately, my goal of using a fridge in the garage on the warmest setting didn't work out too well as it lowered the temp into the 50s for the first 24 hours. I removed it from the fridge and just decided to let the room temp of a dark room suffice (75-76). It's my first batch, so I'm okay if it's not perfect. FWIW, I'm using Safale US-05 yeast. I'm aware the higher temps may produce off flavors, but hopefully, nothing that will prevent it from being drinkable, right?

I don't plan on using a secondary, but will probably leave it in the primary for another week before bottling. I've read about cold crashing and was wondering if this is something I could utilize the fridge for? I can set the temp to its coldest setting and probably get into the 30s or low 40s. Would I just leave it in there for a night or so and then add the priming solution to the bottling bucket, rack the beer and bottle away? Or is that overkill and not worth it?


BTW, I plan to convert a freezer to a ferm chamber via STC-1000 or Brewpi before my next brew, or at the very least, fashion a swamp cooler. In the interest of time and simplicity, I just winged it for my first go-round.

 

[ovenfreshbread]

It shouldn't really be a problem that it was too cold at the beginning. You probably just got a slow start on fermentation, so if you're counting by days rather than measuring specific gravity, don't count those days as primary time. Especially since it's a big beer, you want to make sure that it's fully attenuated before bottling because if the yeast isn't finished attenuating, you'll have exploding bottles, which will be messy and make you very sad. I would say probably just leave it in primary for around three weeks to a month. That's how long it took for a strong belgian I made recently to finish, and I had a good size starter to give it a kick start.

As far as the too high temperatures go, there's not a whole lot to gain from worrying about the temperature now because most of the off flavors are created in the earlier stages of fermenting (or so I've heard). Often you bump up the temperature later in the fermentation to around where you're at to finish out higher gravity beers. Next time, if you don't have the fermentation fridge going, you can put a wet towel or t-shirt on the carboy and point a fan at it, which should cool down your vessel a little. Or you can get crazy and make a swamp cooler or get a big cardboard box and put it over your fermenter with an AC vent pumping air into it. I was able to get to the low 60s with this ugly set up once, but since then, my wife is not into having a huge box sitting around in my house.

Anyway, you'll probably be pretty happy with the results you come out with. It's a neutral yeast with a recommended temp of up to 75, so it's not so far out of the range. Keep in mind that the temperature of the fermenter is probably higher than the ambient air because the fermentation creates heat. The hops in your IIPA should cover up minor off flavors while the beer is still fairly young.

If you're going to bother cold crashing the beer, you might as well leave it for a few days or even longer to get the most benefit you can out of it.

 

[jspain3]

Thanks. Per your suggestion, I'll leave it in the primary for 4 weeks to give the yeast time to finish. It already smells amazing. I need to brew another batch, because it's hard work waiting so long to taste the fruits of your labor.