Activity Streams

S-04, S-05, and Nottingham are all good options. If you’re really worried about the temps (I wouldn’t be) you can do some evaporation cooling. You can pretty easily drop the fermentation temp 5-10 degrees by placing the carboy in a pan of water, soak a towel in the water and wrap the carboy keeping the bottom of the towel in the water to absorb…[Read more]

Any other options you can recommend? I want to try something new but I’m not ready to spend a bunch of money on a fermentation chamber…yet.

I’ve done a ton of brews with no controlled fermentation temperature with US-05 and not had any issues. Over several years of brewing with it, I’ve really only had 1-2 beers that didn’t come out at least “good”.

I guess my point is that if you’re not making the jump to temperature controlled fermentation, that you’re going to have to accept some small level of off flavors. I used to use S-05 about 95% of the time I was brewing, and that was before I did temperature control. I probably did at least 50-60 batches of pale ales and IPAs with S-05 without…[Read more]

That’s what I’m worried about. The ideal temperature range is 59 to 71 for US-05. Since the active fermentation will be 5-10 degrees warmer than room temp, that puts the active fermentation in the 75-80 degree range. Won’t that cause bad flavors?

Agreed on S-05. I been using it for years, and it never lets me down. Yes, you’re at the top of the ideal temperature range, and yes, if you were a professional brewer worried about beating out competition you might worry about minor off flavors, but at a homebrew level and without temperature control, I wouldn’t worry about it.

Safale US-05 is my go-to ale yeast, especially for fermenting around that temperature. It’s a great general purpose yeast that works well at room temperatures and it’s perfect for IPAs/pale ales. It’s been around forever and even with all of these amazing new yeasts, Kveik, etc, US-05 is still my workhorse yeast.

Update: It’s not bad! I don’t think it’s amazing and I probably wouldn’t go buy the ingredients and brew it again, but I don’t think I’ll have trouble working through 5 gallons of it over the fall! It’s got a nice malt flavor, but is probably slightly under-hopped. A lot of that is probably just from using homegrown hops and not having a…[Read more]