Getting hot in here!

I recently had a near disaster with a double IPA. Five days into the ferment, I took a hydrometer reading to make sure the ferment had slowed before dry hopping. This was a Pliny clone with a forest floor of leaf hops that floated atop the beer. Hours after recapping the bucket, I noticed that the controller had been running though its cycle a lot more quickly. I uncapped it and discovered that the probe on my temp controller had been sitting on the hops, not in the beer.  When I got the probe back in the beer it read 30.1C!! 

The hydrometer reading I took before the incident was 1.020 (nowhere near the FG I needed for a big IPA). When I read it again the day after the incident it was 1.013 and has settled at 1.011. I thought I'd ruined the batch, but 30C fermented it out.

Anyone ever cook their fermenting beer? What I tasted pre-bottling ain't bad, but this will spend months bottle conditioning. Have I done long-term damage?

Not a big deal after a week.  A very big deal in the first few days.  Before I had refrigerated temperature control, I have had the same kind of rise after a week and the beer was delightful.  Hard to predict though since a lot of other factors come into play.

However, I am worried about the months of bottle conditioning of a Pliny clone.  that should not age and should be consumed within 6 or 8 weeks of bottling.

jomebrew said:

However, I am worried about the months of bottle conditioning of a Pliny clone.  that should not age and should be consumed within 6 or 8 weeks of bottling.

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+1 - hoppy brews want to be consumed nice and fresh.

With the temp rise I bet your brew won't be quite as good as it could have been, but if it tasted OK at sampling it ought to be fine.