Glycol nightmare questions

[fairhopebrewer]

So I arrived at the brewery this morning to a nightmare scenario — four full 10 bbl fermenters and one full brite with CO2 flowing through the stone, all at 87F. At some point during the weekend, our glycol compressor locked up and the heat of Lower Alabama had its way with our reservoir, raising the glycol temp to 89F and heating up each of my beers. All of them were near or at the end of primary fermentation (pale is on dry hops), and a replacement compressor will be installed in the morning. We will taste and decide on each batch individually, but what are some potential off-flavors I might expect? Should I even bother harvesting this yeast, or should I start from fresh pitches (we don't have a lab at the moment, so yeast counts are out). Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Dan Murphy
Head Brewer
Fairhope Brewing Co.
Fairhope, Alabama

[Starcat]

Chiller Capability

I would consider re-fitting the chiller system with some kind of redundancy if you are going to be away from the brewery for more than over night.

[TGTimm]

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. The cost of dumping an entire batch of beer, or even a full ferm hall of beer, will very quickly pay for a back-up chiller. We've had to run on our back-up twice now, once when a high-pressure gauge blew and lost our refrigerant charge, once when a power spike ate our compressor (both times, of course, on a weekend). We just kept brewing and fermenting while we got the danged thing fixed.

[BrewinLou]

Redundancy is great when it can be afforded. The idea of a high temp cut off is perfect. Your insulated tanks will hold their temp fairly well if there is no hot glycol pumping through. Why the L were you pumping CO2 thru a stone all weekend? I would def order a new yeast slury asap.

[BDL]

A cheap and easy back up, is to get one of those old boxes that plugs into a telephone line and can be programmed to make a phone call if your pipes are in danger of freezing, and modify that to be connected to the alarm output of a controller on your glycol chiller. Then you'll get a phone call if it goes down, takes a little electrical engineering but it is a cheap and dirty way to atleast get a heads up. Also it should be pretty easy to get your chiller and your pumps interlocked so that one can not run without the other.

I'll cross my fingers for ya.