Is My Wyeast Dead?

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Dazzling

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My first experience with Wyeast has turned pear shaped, of course I hadn't read Batz post on getting Wyest started which would have helped immensely and instead followed the instructions on the pack (**** up no. 1 ). The difference being Batz said his took 3 days swell and the pack says 3-4 hours. Anyway i left it overnight and wasn't swelled to much at all but decided to open and pitch anyway (**** up no. 2), only to find that the inner pack hadn't actually been popped (**** up no. 3 :blink: ). Finding this i thought i could still pitch and the nutrients in the inner pack might be able to do their job in 500ml of wort anyway. After 2 days only minor bubbling had occurred and if anything from swilling the bottle it looked as tho the wort had actually carbonated and gone fizzy. At this stage i thought the only thing to save it and get everything mixed was to step up to 2 litres and put on the new magnetic stir plate. It has now been on the stirplate for 18hrs and has not krausened at all.

Can I save this Irish Ale yeast? :(

Dazzling.....
 
All you need to do is to aerate aerate aerate

Believe it or not, I actually pitched a sachet like that (nutrient pack not burst) into a batch, punctured the nutrient pack and sent that after the yeast and aerated for 3 days. Great batch of APA as a result, really great flavor.

Keep shaking that starter bottle

Jovial Monk
 
What temp is your starter at? I made one earlier this week, and it kept stopping every night. Then sat the bottle in a larger tub of water and used my heat belt to keep the temp up. Remember that you are making a starter, not beer, so high temperatures (within reason) help the yeast take off.
 
my first question is, what is the pack date on the pack?

what sg did you make your starter soulution
 
FWIW,
from the St Pat's website:

I made a starter and nothing happened.
This is a common problem today with the large Wyeast XL packs and even many advanced brewers often don't understand the simple answer. If you pitch a lot of yeast, such as from a Wyeast XL, into a 500 mL or even 1 L starter solution, you have too many yeast for the amount of food available. You won't see much activity at all. The starter is fine but if you wish to take full advantage of a starter, make a larger one next time.

I'd suggest you taste the starter and if it tastes like beer, rather than sweet wort, I'd pitch it into the batch.

my 2 cents

Seth :p
 
Dazzling,
I have just made an Irish Ale using Wyeast( saturday), experienced the same thing with the smack pack, didn't swell! After about 4 hours and no change I decided to open and do a starter, kept the starter at about 25 deg for a couple of hours before any signs of activity. When I was happy with the activity of the starter I pitched into wort @ 23 deg, seems to be going well after about 18 hours.

Cheers
Brad
 

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