Rehydrated yeast too hot! help :(

The lady friend and I brewed our first lager today. We rehydrated our (Saflager s-23) yeast like the recipe said, except when we were ready to pitch we noticed the rehydrated yeast was very warm. We had forgot to let the boiled water adequately cool before adding the yeast. When we did check, it was at 110 degrees. Since about 15 minutes had passed since mixing the yeast and water, I'm assuming the initial temp was much higher than this. Reading other posts leads me to believe we definitely killed our yeast. We went ahead and pitched it and right now our fermenter is sitting in a room about at about 53 degrees. We're wondering what to do. Should we go get more yeast and repitch? If we do, should we re-aerate the fermenter before pitching? If we can repitch, how long is our window of oppurtunity? Or is our beer just done for?

I would wait a couple of days before doing anything. Dry yeast is pretty resilient. Someone told me when I first started brewing to always keep 1 or 2 extra packets of a neutral dry yeast at the house in case a ferm doesn't go and you need to emergency-pitch. Good advice.

As for the aeration - if the yeast isn't there to consume the oxygen, how quickly will it escape from the wort? I'm not sure... It probably wouldn't hurt, but may not aid much either.

For now, relax and see what happens.

Provided you were sanitary in your process post boil, your window of opportunity should be several days. Many brewers experience lag times of well over 24 hours even with healthy yeast. However, you will probably need to get to your homebrew shop tomorrow for some more yeast. Otherwise you probably won't find any place open until after Jan 1. Keep that wort nice and cold in the mean time just incase there is anything else in there trying to take hold and grow in the beer. The yeast could surprise you and be fine, but I imagine too much of it was killed to properly ferment the beer.

Should be no need to aerate a second time. The oxygen should stay dissolved as long as temperatures are low. We only aerate because boiling drives off the gases.

The temp that will severely injure yeast is 120° so you may be ok. It wouldn't hurt to pitch another packet just in case. If you get it pitched within a couple days you will be fine.

I wouldn't aerate again because if fermentation did start with the first packet, you wouldn't want to oxidize your beer.

The main this is to relax, it is really hard to mess up beer.

Welcome to HBT!

110F will not injure the yeast. Some dry yeast manufacturers recommend re-hydrating at 110F.