+ steady the Race…

…and ferments the beer. Here are some ways to give your yeast cells a steady and productive fermentation environment to ensure that your beer turns out great. simpler than that. We’re just talking about ways to manage temperature, whatever you want that temperature to be. Control is the name of the game for many aspects of brewing, and controlling temperature should be first on your list as a brewer because your yeast’s health, performance, and effectiveness are relying on it. Yeast cells want a steady and productive environment, and that’s just what we should endeavor to give them.

I’m sure that most of you already have a good sense of why temperature management matters in brewing. Yeast will produce different precursors and compounds, consume sugars at different rates, yield different flavor profiles, exhibit symptoms of stress, and attenuate more or less completely depending on the temperatures in the beer as it is fermenting. Temperature will affect how quickly fermentation starts, how long it lasts, and what is left behind. Temperature will increase the risk of off-flavors, decrease the development of esters and phenols, and often will mean the difference between sweet, apple-like ethanol and harsh, hot fusel alcohols. Neglecting the temperature of your fermentation makes about as much sense as not tuning your guitar before a performance. Temperature matters. I’d go so far as to say that nothing matters more than temperature. So, if everyone is sufficiently panicked, let’s get into how you keep it under control!

Temperature and Timing

In the brewing process, there are effectively three stages of temperature control that yeast cells need. There’s getting to the initial “starting” temperature, managing the “fermenting” temperature, and warming things up for the “final cleanup” temperature.

First, you need to get your beer from the “chilled” post-boil temperature down (or up) to your initial fermentation temperature. You do this during the lag phase (when you first pitch the yeast), to ensure that when your yeast starts its exponential growth phase and begins taking up the simple sugars, it is producing what you want it to produce (no more, no less). So, you might be getting your wort down to about 75–80°F (24–27°C) using your immersion or plate chiller, which is a fairly high start even for a saison. If you begin fermentation there, you might end up with a lot of precursors and off-flavors that you don’t want, so you want to cool that beer down to about 70°F (21°C). I’d start even lower, but saison yeast strains

Control is the name of the game for many aspects of brewing, and controlling temperature should be first on your list as a brewer because your yeast’s health, performance, and effectiveness are relying on it. Yeast cells want a steady and productive environment, and that’s just what we should endeavor to give them.