Tales From the Hot Side

[SacoDeToro]

I brewed up a saison on Friday night and pitched a first generation culture of WLP530, my Belgian yeast of choice. In typical fashion, I saw a short lag time of about one hour. Things were progressing nicely when I left the house around 10:00am the following morning.

One of my Ranco controllers has been on the fritz lately and when I returned later that night, the small space heater in my fridge had been running overtime and my beer was fermenting at 110 degrees F! Holy fuckin' shitballs! I immediately unplugged the heater, cranked up the fridge and put a fan on it too. I was able to get it back down to 70 degrees within 6 hours. Things appear to still be fermenting along steadily. I took a sample this afternoon, thirty-six hours after knockout, and the flavor profile seemed totally fine and what I expected it to be - no fusels, surprisingly. In fact, the beer was already 60% attenuated. I did notice some flocculated globules in the sample, which isn't typical for WLP530, but I can't imagine a bulk of the yeast didn't get cooked.

I thought I'd share this extreme [fermentation] experience and I'll keep you posted on the final results. If I have to dump this beer, oh well... If it turns out well, sweet. Needless to say, I won't be repitching from this batch

[thatguy314]

I brewed up a saison on Friday night and pitched a first generation culture of WLP530, my Belgian yeast of choice. In typical fashion, I saw a short lag time of about one hour. Things were progressing nicely when I left the house around 10:00am the following morning.

One of my Ranco controllers has been on the fritz lately and when I returned later that night, the small space heater in my fridge had been running overtime and my beer was fermenting at 110 degrees F! Holy fuckin' shitballs! I immediately unplugged the heater, cranked up the fridge and put a fan on it too. I was able to get it back down to 70 degrees within 6 hours. Things appear to still be fermenting along steadily. I took a sample this afternoon, thirty-six hours after knockout, and the flavor profile seemed totally fine and what I expected it to be - no fusels, surprisingly. In fact, the beer was already 60% attenuated. I did notice some flocculated globules in the sample, which isn't typical for WLP530, but I can't imagine a bulk of the yeast didn't get cooked.

I thought I'd share this extreme [fermentation] experience and I'll keep you posted on the final results. If I have to dump this beer, oh well... If it turns out well, sweet. Needless to say, I won't be repitching from this batch

Gnarly! Let us know how the beer comes out. Or better yet, bring this beer to NHC!

Maybe at the hot temps 530 will actually attenuate. I've always heard it has attenuation problems relative to 3724

[milehimark]

Funny you heard that 530 is a poor attenuator. I got an all malt Belgian single from 1.050 down to 1.004 without a problem, or without any extreme temps. Should be nice and dry.

[SacoDeToro]

I've always heard it has attenuation problems relative to 3724

I've always been able to get WLP530 to attenuate well in beers under 9.5% ABV. My single ale is usually 85% attenuated, my saisons about 90-92% attenuated, my strong golden 89-90%, etc...

[DBear]

Congrats that you didn't get blowoff all over the place, 530 can be a vigorous fermentor. Have you made saisons with 530 before? That is not the first non-saison yeast I would have thought of. I have never had a lag time of 1 hour with 530, what was the OG of the beer and the size of the starter?

[Bugeater]

Most of the saisons I have done have been with 565. I let this stuff ramp up to as high a temp as it will go on its own and then slowly raise it to around 95° or so. As long as you didn't get close to 140° you didn't cook the stuff. 110° is a little high but should work just fine though I would drop it to the low 90's.

Just don't try to drop the temp too fast or the yeast will stop working and you will have attenuation problems. I don't know about the yeast you are using, but the 565 will stop and start at random times on it's own even if you don't do anything to it. Any sudden change of temp will definitely make it stop for a while. Just be patient and it will take off again.

Wayne

[SacoDeToro]

In my experience, 530 works best at 70 degrees for the flavor profile I seek in my Belgian-style beers. I wasn't concerned about halting activity by rapidly cooling it from 110 degrees so much as I was halting the potential production of fusels and other off-flavors. 530 has a totally different activity profile than 565. In my experience, 565 is a very poor performer. I disabused myself a long time ago to the notion that you must use a saison-derived strain to make a good saison. I've found 530 to have rustic flavors in most Belgian-style applications, especially when it's used as the bottle conditioning yeast. I've used 530 in many saisons to my personal satisfaction.

The particular saison I brewed this time had a large proportion of rye and some triticale as well. It was a pretty protein-heavy wort and normally I would've expected a large amount of blow-off. I can only guess that at 110 degrees CO2 came out of solution so readily that it never formed a foamy krausen. I'll know when I clean out the conical at the end of fermentation.

I pitched approximately one million cells per mililiter of wort per degree Plato - pretty standard. The OG of the beer was 1.056 and I'm targeting an FG of 1.004-1.005

[SacoDeToro]

Looks like things finished out at 1.005 for about 91% attenuation. No off-flavors or fusels that I can detect. Pretty crazy.