jgriffin said:
I can't see what i did wrong... but this is what i did.
I boiled up 1.5L of water with 1/3 cup DME. Stuck it in the freezer till it cooled to room temp. I then poured 75% of it into a coke bottle and shook the shit out of it for 2 mins or so. I then shook the Yeast Tube and pitched it into the mix, and them poured some of the remaining wort into the tube to "wash out" any left over yeast, then poured the rest into the coke bottle, stuck on the airlock, and waited.
Hi John,
Your starter technique seems to be in order - although when I make my Bavarian Lager starters, I make a 500ml starter and then step up over 2 days to make about 3 litres, of which I pitch some on brewday and stubbie off the rest for future use. I find that you need to allow the yeast to start multiplying and then it gets stuck into the fermentation phase after its initial growth phase (there are proper terms for this but I don't have them handy here at work...). I step yeast up when it is developing krausen and not beforehand. That is why I pitch a yeast at high krausen - it has gotten over the multiplying stage and is ready to hook in and eat up the fermentable sugars in the solution - and that's why I have minimal lag time between pitching and fermentation...
One of the biggest problems with yeast is shocking the cell walls through variations in solution composition and temperature. Was the yeast tube at room temp? How close to room temp was the starter? You have two things that the yeast cells have to deal with - different temperatures and you are plunging the yeast cells into a different solution from where they came. Some craftbrewers argue that this is why they rehydrate their dry yeast in cooled boiled water, without any malt addition. I generally try to make sure that my 1.040 starter and the host smack pack or tube are at the same temp well before I mix the yeast into the aerated starter. Ideally its good to use some of your brew wort as the starter if you have good brewing techniques that allow you to develop the yeast starter from the brew wort and keep the brew wort from getting infected whilst you let the starter develop.
Now I don't want to slag off your local HBS guy, but how did he store the tubes? How old was the yeast? Were the tubes in the front of a glass door fridge that gets some sunlight on it - every day? It is possible that the yeast was inert when you bought it :blink: ...but highly unlikely <_<
Don't rush the yeast - if you toss it out then you're stuffed...At least you can persist with it for a few more days, keep an eye on the gravity of the starter if necessary - taste a sample that you measured the gravity with. If it tastes like shite then you are a goner - you will know if you have an infection from the smell, well before you see the mutation. You may not have a gusher krausen wise, but at the micro level, the yeast may be hanging in there and actually growing - you just haven't seen it yet with the naked eye...
[poor pun]
ALL WE ARE SAYING....IS GIVE YEAST A CHANCE! :lol:
:lol:
[/poor pun]
Cheers,
TL
