Cold Beer

The exact same thing happened to me. Nothing in there got HOT per se, but it did warm up. Did lose a bunch of food that was in there, but I'm not worrying about any of the beer. Logically it's not possible to get above room temp, and that's not enough to cause any issues. If I was trying to preserve it in a lit stove, then there's problems.

 

go with the fridge, but dont cellar for long

 

Unless the fridge turned into a blast furnace overnight, they will be fine. Cold beer warming up and being ruined is among the most egregious of beer myths.

 

Probably not going to be an issue. What style of beer were they? I would say that hoppy beers are more prone to skunking, if they got over 70-80 degrees this could be a problem. However, I have had beer get that warm without issue. I had some sierra nevada pale with me on a rafting trip and it began to get warm,not nearly enough ice in the cooler on the river. Then it was left in the cooler in my car for two days and was fine, I stuck it in the fridge and opened it a couple days later and tasted the same as it had before the ordeal.

 

Heat does not cause skunking. Light causes skunking. Prolonged exposure to moderate-high temperature will cause volatiles in the beer to break down more quickly, but that's really more of a concern for long term storage.

 

Heat also accelerates staling. Breweries will heat a beer up 60C (140F) for this. You can put the equivalent of a year on the beer quickly, a day or so.

 

http://craftbeerusa.blogspot.com/2008/07/can-you-take-heat.html?m=1
Basically, if you are comfortable, so is your beer. During fermentation, most yeast strains prefer temperatures between 55°F and 75°F (or 45°F and 55°F, if you happen to be lager yeast). These ranges qualify as “room temperature” for most anywhere, and any of us will generally be comfortable in these environments. Over 75°F and yeast begin to produce some quite nasty byproducts, lending off-flavors to the finished product. Much over 100°F and yeast start to die, so their comfort range is pretty close to that of any other organism. But all this is for brewing; what about the packaged beer on the shelf?

For most beers the commercial product is inert, the yeast having died off long ago due to lack of food, filtered out or killed through a variety of pasteurization processes. What is left in the bottle is a mix of sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils and trace other chemicals (plus water, naturally). None of these compounds is active, so the only thing left for them to do is to degrade over time.

Unfiltered, unpasteuried beers. What kind of attenuations do you think most craft brewers get 100%?

 

In general they do not get 100% but whatever is left after fermentation is unfermentable by the strain used for fermentation. If they still have fermentables left then the beer was packaged too early and you will have bottle bombs. Just because there may be sugar in the mix does not mean its fermentable - it depends on the structure of the available sugar (among other things).

 

Isn't it great that stupidly hopped craft beers came about? Cause now you can chill the cr*p of them and still get that bitter blow to the head.

OR
Craft Imperial Triple IPAs 1
BMC 0

 

You left this off. Staling happens to all beers.

This is where the temperature is a factor. Heat accelerates chemical reactions, making the natural breakdown processes of large molecules into small molecules happen more quickly than they would otherwise. What does this mean for beer? Simply this: it ages faster. A general rule of thumb for the brewing industry is that beer stored at 100°F for one week tastes as old as beer stored at 70°F for two months, or as old as beer stored at 40°F for one year.

 

I was unfamiliar with this process. Is there a noticable difference in taste between a beer stored for 100F for one week and the same beer stored at 40F for a year? If not, why do we keep these beers in the basement/closet for so damn long?

 

Most professional brewers knock their yeast out by dropping the temp. It's not home brewing where you dont have temp control. You hit you terminal gravity for the beer you want, drop the temp and the yeast goes to sleep.

 

Oh yes. Some craft brewers have a nasty hot room they keep beer in to see how quickly it goes south. Kind of a worst case scenario QC.

 

That is not correct. They drop the temp to cold crash (which can also be done on a homebrew scale) which will help drop yeast and protein out of suspension as a method of clearing the beer. Letting the yeast sleep makes no sense unless you want to creat bottle bombs during transportation or storage in warm temps. A lot of ale yeast will work just fine @60 degrees F. There are ways to kill yeast off if you hit a certain attenuation level but dropping the temp to put yeast to sleep then package the beer is not a smart thing to do.

 

You mean you don't bake your beer to speed up the aging process? Rumor has it that a BA stout at 350 for 20 minutes approximates 2 years in your cellar.

 

They don't get 100%, but what your silly blog post, and assumption comes from is that the yeast wakes up and eats more sugar if it gets warm, and thats not the case. The yeast have shit the bed and stopped eating sugars when the beer reached it's final gravity. If it's a bottle conditioned beer, that has yeast in it, and another sugar source added to carb it in the bottle, a specific amount is added to carb it whatever volume the brewer wants.

If that was the case of the bottles being "woken from sleep" due to the temps getting in the 70's then you'd have bottles exploding all the place from it. Which isn't the case. The simple sugars brewers yeast eats, is out of shit to eat when it's bottled. Wild yeast can cause gushers and bottle bombs, because they don't eat the same stuff the beers' intended yeast eat.

Point is, this doesn't say anything about your claim that warm beer wakes up yeast to eat oxygen, which is why I said it was mis information, and full of shit.

I brew by the way, I know what I'm doing, and how the process works. Yeast don't eat oxygen, they eat sugars.

Unless you take a warm beer, open it, add sugar and cap it back.. The yeast ain't doing shit but dying from the heat.

 

Wrong.

They cold crash and spin their beers to drop the yeast to clear the beer, remove proteins and anything that can cause chill haze. They also do it to have a nicer looking product to package, as well as save money by keeping as much yeast as possible in the brewhouse for the next generation, as well as for lab work to check on any mutations in the strain and when to use a new batch.

Some do it to keep home brewers and other places from getting a proprietary strain.

You can cold crash and do most of all of that as a homebrewer too, and most have temp control as well.

Breweries would never just cold crash a beer and stop the yeast from attenuating to the end of it's limits. They know the limits and brew the beer accordingly, and would not just stop it mid way.

 

Certain favors come from aging at 50f or so. More of a controlled aging. Too long and those go stale.

Buy 2 fresh beers, put one in the fridge, and one in the oven at the lowest setting over night. Chill the beer that has been in the oven, then compare the 2 beers.

 

More of a temperature controlled chamber about the size of a dorm fridge, from what I have seen.

 

Should you pre-heat first so you don't burn the edges, or just cover them with foil? Or is that just for pot-pie?