Summer Brewing

Hi Paul, welcome to the forum! There are a few ways to brew in the summer:

1. Brew styles that can tolerate warmer temperatures. The classic example is saison, but there are other styles that work just as well. Lately I've been experimenting with the "kveik" yeast that Norwegian farmhouse brewers use. It can make good beer at temperatures up to 37C, but it also works fine at more standard temperatures. Strains of it are available from lots of different vendors in the U.S., but I don't know about Europe.

2. Arrange some kind of temperature control. Honestly, 20-23C is only slightly too warm for most top-fermenting styles, so you could probably get away with minimal temperature control. People sometimes put the fermenter in a tub of water and add a few frozen water bottles (replacing them with new bottles when they melt), or drape some wet cloth over the fermenter so that it cools by evaporation.

There are more elaborate and consistent methods as well, including refrigerators with digital temperature control or the BrewJacket product (which I use). But if I had a cellar like yours, I would try cheaper methods first. You only need a few degrees of cooling for top-fermenting styles. (For lagers you would need something more powerful, although these days a lot of people are fermenting lagers fairly warm.)

I hope that helps.

 

Hey, you sure can brew in the summer. Use a water bath and change the water daily, but, sounds like you will be ok.

 

Brew saisons

 

Absolutely try some beers with kveik, I just made my first one and it's like orange marmalade in a glass! Saisons are great too.

I'll be in Switzerland next week! Hitting Lucerne and Zermatt

 

I have only brewed a couple of saisons, it's just not a style I care to brew very often. So I don't have any recipe advice, except I don't think you need amber malt extract. I would probably use a blend of light DME and wheat malt extract. (By the way, most "wheat malt extract" is actually a blend of pilsner malt and wheat malt, so check the packaging to make sure you are getting the amount of wheat you want.)

The other thing I'd point out about saisons is that you can ferment many of those yeasts fairly warm. For instance, Wyeast says that the temperature range for its "Belgian Saison" strain (WY3724) is 70-95°F (about 21-35C). So you are probably at no risk of the beer getting too warm during fermentation. If anything you might worry about it not getting warm enough.

I'm going to add a little side note, which is that it is easier than you probably think to do a "mini-mash." The way this works is that you use malt extract for most of the recipe, but you also use a small amount of base malt plus whatever other fermentables you might want to add. So for instance if you wanted to add flaked oats to a recipe, you might use a pound of pilsner malt and half a pound of flaked oats. You just crush the pilsner malt (or buy it already crushed) and hold them in about two liters of ~65C water for about an hour and then pour the liquid through a strainer into your boil kettle. Then you add the malt extract just like normal. A mini-mash is more forgiving than an ordinary mash because you're still getting most of your fermentables from the malt extract, so the mini-mash is just meant to allow you to use grain types that have to be mashed.

There is no need to store the bottled beer at fermentation temperature or lower. For instance, I just fermented a pale ale at about 19C and then bottled it. While the beer was carbonating, I kept the bottles at the ambient room temperature in my apartment, which is about 23C. That's totally fine, and in fact the warmth probably helps the yeast carbonate the beer faster. For long-term storage, of course, the cooler the better, but once the beer is carbonated you can put it in your refrigerator.

The Sigmund's Voss kveik is the one I have used most, and I've had great experiences with it. It's obviously great for traditional Norwegian-style farmhouse beers, but I've found that it works well in a wide variety of styles, including IPA.

Good luck!

[edited for clarity]

 

can also do IPA using a sacch trois yeast (imperial citrus/wlp644), it can do 19-27C ranges.

 

Absolutely you can brew in the summer, especially in Switzerland. Here in the desert southwest of the US, temperatures exceed 115°F (46°C), and I still brew. The only time we see temperatures as low as your cellar are during the winter, and cellars are very uncommon here, so we have to ferment above ground. As long as you have air conditioning, the temperature in your house probably won't be uncomfortably high anyway.

A basic swamp cooler or water bath with frozen bottles should get you where you need to be. I fermented for about a year that way before I got a chest freezer with a temperature controller, which I highly recommend. Now I can ferment lagers during the summer if I want!

 

I use the water bath method here in Arizona. Another style you might want to try is a Hefeweizen. I do those this time of year and they turn out well (ferment at 75-76 F).

 

Holy shit, that's pretty warm for a hefe! Would you say you get a lot of banana and/or bubblegum character at that temperature?

 

No bubblegum but lots of banana. I just bottled one that fermented around 72 F. Interested to see how this one tastes compared to the last one.

 

One of my formative hefe experiences was drinking Tröegs Dreamweaver on tap at a local bar. The banana character was really strong and I couldn't get enough of it. What yeast are you using?

[Edited to add: Hey @PaulBasel, sorry for hijacking your thread. Hefeweizen is a popular style in the US, especially in the summer, so people get pretty excited about it.]

 

Mangrove Jack's M20 Dry Yeast

 

Any refrigerator or freezer can work assuming your fermenter will fit inside. You just need to get a temperature controller to hook up to it, and you've got a readymade fermentation chamber. You can even hook up a small heater inside to ferment warmer than ambient temperature. Inkbird makes cheap controllers that seem to work well.