No activity on Berliner Weisse

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What would you do?

  • Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew, and wait it out.

  • Order replacement yeast, overnight delivery, to pitch on monday.

  • Pitch clean yeast and get it fermenting.

  • Use available locally sourced sour yeast to pitch.


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monkeybox

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Brewed a Berliner Weisse on monday (72 hours ago), and pitched the Wyeast Berliner Weisse blend.

A couple mea culpas:
1) I may have pitched too hot. (I may have pitched at 130 deg instead of the 85 deg I thought I was pitching at)
2) I broke my hydrometer, so I don't have anything other than beersmith estimates to go by.

So 72 hours have gone by with no airlock activity (and I know that don't mean ****), so I decided to crack the bucket and take a look/smell. There is no krausen, and the wort still smells sweet. There's no sign of activity at all.

What would you do?
 
Forgot to add, it's unlikely that my LHBS has any more berliner blend available. That's the obvious first choice (repitch), but probably not an option.
 
Airlock activity is not 100% representative of fermentation activity, especially with some bacteria. Give it time. Keep a slightly Warner temp for another day. If you're SOL on more yeast maybe make a mini sour mash in your oven and add that. But I would play the waiting game.
 
Be patient I bet it will take off in a couple days. I had my last Flanders take a week to get rolling then it boomed for 10 days
 
Brewed a Berliner Weisse on monday (72 hours ago), and pitched the Wyeast Berliner Weisse blend.

A couple mea culpas:
1) I may have pitched too hot. (I may have pitched at 130 deg instead of the 85 deg I thought I was pitching at)

Can you rule out the pitching temp question? If you pitched at 130F, you probably killed off the sacch and only have lacto and maybe some critically injured Brett remaining. I'm also a little curious why you were shooting to pitch at 85F, I seem to recall Wyeast recommending a standard ale temp range for that blend?

Having said all that, I used it last year and it took 3-4 days to start fermenting (at around 66F) and then blew off after it got going.
 
I went with option 2, and ordered two vials of lacto for monday delivery and let it go through the weekend. Sure enough, activity picked up on Sunday, for a lag time of 6 days. I'm guessing the high temperature killed off much of the yeast and bacteria, as I did almost the same recipe last year and had a normal lag time.

It's been about a month, and I will probably bottle in another couple weeks.

Now I have to figure out what to do with the lacto I ordered (I ordered a vial of each: Wyeast Lacto Buchneri and White Labs Delbrueckii).
 

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