Pitching dry yeast with no hydration at a commercial scale

[Nizmoose]

Just thought I'd throw this post up as it might let some people rest easier after throwing a sachet into their fv and hoping they shouldn't have rehydrated instead. After reading so much over the years on the fierce battle between the old rehydration vs no rehydration camps and after reading what I considered an extremely dubious call by Jamil Zainasheff that pitching dry yeast straight into wort would lead to up to 50% loss on viability I decided to see what a few yeast packets of lager yeast 2 years past their best before date would do in 30hL of wort pitched straight through the manway of the fv.

There was no concern from anyone at work that it would be an issue and it was a small one off batch either way so we went ahead with it. 24 hours post pitching we had passed the lag phase and the beer was fermenting and I ran a viability check and got 96%. Just thought I'd throw another data point into the ring for everyone to consider.

 

[goatchop41]

Fermentis themselves now encourage dry pitching - as per their E2U recommendations. It would seem that they have either made refinements to their product that makes it more hardy...or perhaps they always were that way, but they've only just recently become confident enough to fully endorse dry pitching

 

[Nizmoose]

I'm also interested in the importance of the best before date, these packets granted were stored cold their entire life but I was genuinely amazed at the viability that far past the BB

 

[FarsideOfCrazy]

I always dry pitch my dry yeast. I always would have thought the company who makes the stuff would know the practice for use.

How many packets in the 30hl of wort exactly did you pitch? I take it that pitching rates change the more you're pitching otherwise it would be around 120 packets! (ie. 1 packet per 30l)

Keep us posted how it turns out.

 

[peteru]

I assume that these would have been 500g Saflager packs.

 

[Nizmoose]

I always dry pitch my dry yeast. I always would have thought the company who makes the stuff would know the practice for use.

How many packets in the 30hl of wort exactly did you pitch? I take it that pitching rates change the more you're pitching otherwise it would be around 120 packets! (ie. 1 packet per 30l)

Keep us posted how it turns out.

Yeah sorry should have clarified these were 500g packs and I pitched three. The fermentation was terminal in around 100 hours and the lag phase lasted 12 hours. Important to keep in mind this was a lager fermentation

 

[Droopy Brew]

Yeah sorry should have clarified these were 500g packs and I pitched three. The fermentation was terminal in around 100 hours and the lag phase lasted 12 hours. Important to keep in mind this was a lager fermentation

So 0.5g/L? Equivalent to an 11g packet in a 22L batch.
Surely that is a pretty big under-pitch for a lager- about 1/3 of an ideal minimum pitch rate if my calcs are correct.
Is this a scale thing? Do large scale ferments require less cells/mL/plato than small scale HB batches?

 

[Nizmoose]

So 0.5g/L? Equivalent to an 11g packet in a 22L batch.
Surely that is a pretty big under-pitch for a lager- about 1/3 of an ideal minimum pitch rate if my calcs are correct.
Is this a scale thing? Do large scale ferments require less cells/mL/plato than small scale HB batches?

Sorry 15hL! Not able to correct my initial post hopefully an admin can, wrote the original post at home and just checked at work now, must have had 30 in my head from 3 packets.

 

[Fro-Daddy]

3 x 500g packets in 15hL, is that your final answer?

 

[Black n Tan]

What temp did you pitch at? Fermentis say you can pitch directly into wort provided it is >20C, so curious of your pitching process for a lager.

 

[Nizmoose]

3 x 500g packets in 15hL, is that your final answer?

Lock it in Eddie

 

[Nizmoose]

What temp did you pitch at? Fermentis say you can pitch directly into wort provided it is >20C, so curious of your pitching process for a lager.

Can't remember off the top of my head but we have never used packets before and this was a very once off kind of brew day so I doubt we changed the transfer chill temp from what would have been set and we normally go to the fv at a few degrees below fermentation temp, so I'd guess 10c off the top of my head.

Can't stress enough that this was a very non-standard brew day, with a very small amount of wort from a brewhouse which normally pitches cone to cone or from a 6hL prop so I'm certainly not necessarily advocating any of the pitching rates we used because frankly we went and grabbed the last packets we had in the cold room and the beer was a one off keg only batch so consistency was not a concern. My original post was to focus more on the viability post pitching straight into wort, the rest is really not particularly relevant for this batch.

In case people are interested, if it were a standard batch we would take a yeast sample from the cone of the fv we were pitching from, spin it down, count it and do a viability test. That spin number (percentage solids), viability and count goes into a yeast calculator and that determines our pitch amount. The yeast being pitched would typically have been chilled down a day or so prior (obviously after the beer it was fermenting was terminal and cleared of any faults). Our pitching rate varies but for a standard beer 1 million cells per ml per degree Plato is the ballpark target. This count is checked post pitching.

Like I said this was a real once off "let's see what happens" kind of moment with what some would call surprisingly good results