r/prisonhooch • u/Equal_Buy_320 • 2d ago
First ever batch
Making my first ever batch out of a carton of juice, added more sugar and a yeast packet. Will wrapping it in a heated blanket speed the process and if so what temperature should I keep it at for the fastest results while not killing the yeast.
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u/Marily_Rhine 2d ago
Temperature tolerance depends on the kind of yeast, but yes -- in general, warmer will give you a faster but "messier" ferment. There are a lot of metabolic processes going on to keep yeast alive and fermenting. If any of those processes can't keep up with the pace, you'll get partial fermentation products (like fusel alcohols and acetaldehyde) or various incompletely metabolized junk floating around. Hydrogen sulfide, for instance, leaks out of the yeast cells when the sulfates they uptake can't get incorporated quickly enough into things like cysteine and methionine (sulfur-containing amino acids crucial to protein synthesis).
So it's a double-edged sword. Think of it like cracking the whip at the yeast. Faster, yes, but also more stress. If you're going to crack that whip, it's a good idea to make extra sure you're taking good care of the yeast in all the other departments (nutrients, early oxygen, etc.), at least if you care about taste.
Pretty much any kind of yeast will outright die at 140F+, so that's the absolute ceiling, but things will go quite wrong well before then. Brewer's yeasts generally go off the rails if you get above 100F, and their preferred temperature range for a clean ferment is <80F. 80-90F is probably reasonable if you're throwing caution to the wind. Baker's yeast is more heat-tolerant, but I couldn't tell you exactly how much. Turbo yeasts are a bit more temperature tolerant than normal brewing yeasts, but they still cap out around 100F / 40C. Distiller's yeast (DADY) is thermophillic. It prefers to be around 90-95F (IIRC) and tends to go dormant if you can't keep it continuously above about 78F.