Raise ferm temp with hot liquor

[Woolsocks]

Has anyone used hot liquor to quickly raise the temp of fermenting beer? I'm gonna do this later today unless someone talks me out of it. Beer is a slightly high-gravity brew, so dilution is OK.

[MCBW]

Do you have a coolong jacket around your unitank? If so, You could turn off the chiller but keep the pump running and heat up your ferment with ambient room temp if chiller is inside. Or if it is outside use the summer heat to increase temp. Then you dont have to add anything to the beer. Just close all other tank jackets before you turn off chiller.

[Jephro]

Uhhh, do you really want to do that?

It just seems like you are opening yourself up for a bunch of unknowns adding hot liquor to fermenting wort. Contamination, oxidation being the biggest concerns of mine. If you do I would say boil it first, but chill it some so you don't kill off a bunch of the yeast.

BUT, i would suggest first reading these for other ideas if you just want to increase the temp:
This thread
and This thread

[Damase]

I have in the past heated the fermenter by heating water up (and keeping the flame on), while recirculating it through the Gylcol heat exchanger. Then turning off all tanks but the one I wanted to heat, and turn off the condenser I was able to slowly raise the temp of the fermenter (about 10 degrees in an hour or so) with the now warm Glycol.

Dammy

[Woolsocks]

The solution

The "heat up your glycol" sounded appealing, but our brewpub's beer pythons share glycol with our fermenters (cheaped out on that!), and I didn't think our customers would like hot beer, so I didn't do that.

I did disconnect the glycol from the fermenter and shoot warm water through the jackets, which worked very well! Thanks for the idea.