This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by Brew Dudes) is all about brewing in the summer:

How do you beat the heat of summer time brewing? From brew house conditions to managing fermentation temperatures, what do you do differently to continue to brew quality beers?

Tim and I do all our brewing outside in our screened-in porch, or occasionally out on the deck. So summertime heat definitely affects our process, but not negatively. We’ve found that brewing is actually quite a bit easier when it’s hot outside.

Summer brewing on the deck

For one thing, water heats up much faster in the summer, and it holds its heat better too. We can’t apply heat to our mash tun, so we heat up strike water to add to our grains in order to hit our mash temperature. In the winter, we’re more likely undershoot since the water can lose a lot of heat as we’re pouring it.

Our mash tun is well-insulated, so once the mash is in there and we close it up, it holds in heat pretty efficiently, even in the winter. We usually only lose a degree or two over the course of an hour, regardless of the season.

On the contrary, there’s a big summertime difference during the sparge, when the mash tun lid is constantly being removed to add more sparge water. In cold weather, it can be tough to keep the grain bed in the high-160° F range for efficient grain rinsing. But in the summer, the grain bed doesn’t lose as much heat, so the whole process goes much more smoothly.

Sparging in the screened-in porch

Again, since heating up water goes so fast in the summer, bringing the sweet wort up to a boil is nice and quick. Cooling on the other hand, not so much. We still use our original, plain-old, copper wort chiller, nothing fancy. Since the water coming out of the faucet isn’t quite as cold during the summer, it takes longer than desired to cool the wort to pitching temperature. But this is really just a minor annoyance, not an actual problem to solve. (We have been eyeing the Therminator for some time now, but haven’t made the leap just yet.)

We do all our fermentation in the basement, which stays nearly constant at 68° F all summer. So yeah, pretty perfect! In the winter, it gets kinda frigid down there, so we have to use a space heater to keep our ales at the optimal 68° F. Lagers are easy-peasy, whether it’s winter or summer, since we have a dedicated fermentation fridge with a temperature controller.

Of course, it wasn’t always so easy to keep our fermenters at the right temperature. We used to live in an apartment with no basement, so we fermented all our homebrews in the kitchen (we didn’t make lagers at the time). To keep them relatively cool, we would wrap the carboys in a wet towel, which was surprisingly effective. We were usually able to keep the fermenters around 68-72° F with this method.

So basically, brewing in the summer is awesome. I really can’t complain. Plus, you can’t beat relaxing outside with beer in hand and wort a-boilin’.