Need to cool my cellar down

68 isn't bad...I wouldn't stress.

 

If your furnace is in your basement, and that's what is keeping it warm down there, try insulating the ducting and closing any vents. I had this issue for awhile in my basement.

Also an AC running in a closed room (no outlet) will only heat the room slightly. You need to use it to pull the heat out of your cellar and discharge it somewhere else....like outside (window) or an adjacent room. 68 doesn't sound too bad to me though. Good luck.

 

68 is fine. I cellared that temp for awhile and had great results. Just avoid light and temp fluctuations and you'll be fine

 

I'm going to echo everyone else and say that 68 is fine. However, I want to expand on why this is a terrible idea. Air Conditioning units work by using energy to move heat from one spot to another (in the very theoretical sense). Because you can't move heat around for free, and because doing any kind of meaningful work generates heat, this means that an AC unit in a closed room will heat the room. These are all straightforward consequences of the laws of thermodynamics. This is why AC units have to be mounted in windows, they vent the heat outside. This is also why AC units are a big contributor to the "heat island" effect around cities, where cities are hotter than the surrounding countryside.

Fridges work the same way, you may have noticed that the area around your fridge (especially in the back) is warmer than elsewhere in your house.

 

I have no experience, but logic would dictate that since 68 or 70 is room temperature for most beer/wine/liquor stores, it's not terrible to store at this temp

 

I have the same issue as my cellar is under the front porch.
Thanks for reassuring me folks. Cheers!

 

Don't know how deep you want to dive into this or how much space you have but you may want to consider building an enclosed area in your cellar. I've seen others on this site do it and with a few 2x4s and some drywall or even thick plastic you could make a small room in the corner of your cellar and it would be much easier to cool it using an AC unit or running a duct to it from your central AC. Just a thought.

 

I suggest freezing some beer into ice blocks (skating optional) and putting them down there. Then you can drink them when they melt!

 

I run a dehumidifier in my basement and it is usually around 60 degrees. No problems like running an AC unit

 

For those of you saying 68 is fine, what if it goes down to a range of about 46-50 in the winter time?

My basement storage unit is basically that...it's gotten as high as 68/69 in the summer and stays steady around 46-52 in the winter. Cause for concern? I've been noticing some odd tastes in some of the beers I've been pulling out lately, so I've been trying to pinpoint the problem.

 

As long as it's not getting to freezing, colder is generally fine. The thing people really worry about is fluctuation, but it's not clear that fluctuation is really a problem.

A friend of mine recently told me that he doesn't worry at all about seasonal fluctuation on the order of 50's in the winter to 60's in the summer because that's the conditions you have at a lot of the actual lambic breweries (we were talking about lambic there). I'm not totally sure if this is the case, but it does make some sense.

You also have to remember that the rule about 55 and constant is the rule mostly because it's the rule. As far as I can find out no one has ever really done a systematic testing of aging in various conditions. There's more information out there about wine, but it's not clear how applicable that is to beer and it's even less clear how true a lot of it is.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about that temp swing.

What is the odd taste, and in what beers?

 

Thanks for the input stupac2...

I feel like the odd taste is oxidation, but that's just a complete guess since I've never had a side by side of an oxidized beer and non-oxidized to really understand the difference.

It's almost like an unexpected sweetness, sometimes with a very very slight tartness. Maybe a little metalic like flavor. It's usually with stouts and barleywines.

 

Well, to be fair, oxidization is sort of the point of aging those types of beers. I've started to believe that oxidation is one of the more divisive flavors in beer drinking, so the desirability of aging stouts/barleywines can vary really dramatically between people. It's possible that you just don't like the resulting flavors.

This article makes it sound like you're experiencing textbook oxidation: http://www.professorbeer.com/articles/oxidative_staling_beer.html. Well, except for the sour part, but that could be either psychosomatic or if you had previously had a sour beer in the glass, some remnants creeping in.

 

I have had some really heavily oxidised beers (way beyond what you'd normally find), and they can wind up with a definite kind of sourness. It is almost like a fruitiness, which sounds appealing, but it's certainly not enjoyable at the level I experienced. I couldn't guess the chemistry behind it, but I'd imagine it can occur on a continuum to give a barely-perceptible tartness.

 

Sherry flavor is definitely a good way to describe it. The sour part is probably more so just a metallic taste. Guess I'm going to cut back on stout aging. Although I've always loved stouts with age on them (when not cellared by me). And it's not like anything has been in there for a long time...I only started cellaring April '12.

 

Perhaps, this is certainly above my pay grade. I can't say that I remember having an old beer with unexpected sourness, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

 

I'm in the same boat, not good heading into the summer. Unfortuantley my basement is huge and unfinished, so the air conditioner is not an option.

 

Fluctuation is an issue with wine because corks can swell and shrink and enough cycles of this can start allowing air into the bottle. With most beers having crown caps or being corked and caged, I personally do not think that a small amount of fluctuation is bad, provided the high isn't very high and the room is still dark.

 

Oxidative tartness is just the best. It seems to be more typical in beers with some roasted malt (and is probably somewhere on the soy-sauce-flavor spectrum, based on my experience), and it's definitely in the 10+ year aging timeframe (I tend to mentally divide cellaring into lambic, 6-24 month, 3-6 year, and 10+ year cellaring in terms of maturation, development of characteristic flavor profiles, etc).

OP and others, if you're concerned, there's a pretty great book called <i>How and Why to Build a Wine Cellar</i> that has a ton of great advice for insulation and passive cooling for basement spaces (active cooling, e.g. with a portable A/C unit, should only be necessary if you live fairly far south or don't have a true below-grade basement to cellar in). But I agree with others in the thread that the temperature variation you're describing is probably not a significant issue for casual beer aging.