1st post - Yeast starter question

Hi all,
So I'm doing my first brew right now, an oatmeal stout, and I have a question about my yeast starter. I snooped around at the stickies and stuff first, but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. So, I started my yeast in a sanitized glass jar, laid some plastic wrap lightly over it, which seemed to be giving it some air and put it in a warm place. Now, here comes the hitch: I started the yeast around 10 am and didn't pitch it until around 1 pm. Now, about 30 hours into fermentation, I'm not seeing any activity in my air lock. So I am just wondering if it sat too long or something? :smack: I know I am being a worry-wart (or is it worry-wort, in these circles?), but a bit of encouragement/reassurance would be appreciated! Thanks so much! What a great community! Cheers!

Don't worry.
The yeast starter is probably fine. We can go into yeast starting methods at some point if you want, but yours should be fine. My only question would be what do you mean by a warm place? Most yeast don't like it very warm.

As for seeing activity in the air lock, you don't always. Mine tend to be pretty active but lots of the time there isn't much activity.

Just today I read about someone who did 10 gallons, split it into two 5 gallon fermenting batches, made only minor changes in the brews with things like hops, used the same yeast starter in both 5 gallon batches and one is blowing and going and the other is showing no outward signs.
Both batches are sitting in the same tub of ice water to control the temperature of the fermentation also.

He said he opened the lid on the bucket and it's in suspension and there is turbulence from the fermentation though.
Leave it be and it will be beer soon.

Thanks for the reply, Sharps.

RE: "My only question would be what do you mean by a warm place?"

I kept it in a warmish part the kitchen near the stove. No warmer than 80 degrees, though. Still think its going to be all right?

It should be fine but you want to keep the starter in conditions more in keeping with what the yeast wants when it's fermenting, except lots of oxygen the whole time since the whole time should be spent growing the yeast population.

Each type of yeast has a range it likes best, but they are all going to be quite a bit cooler than that. What sort of temp are you fermenting at and did you check out what the yeast is supposed to be at?
Remember, the actual fermenting wort can be several degrees warmer than the air around the bucket.

Give it a few days, look for signs of activity visually, check the hydrometer.
You may have actually reduced the amount of yeast you pitched at that temperature, but there should be enough for it to grow and make beer.

i use an old wine jug for my starters just make sure you give it swirl every time you go by it for the first day. This will help tghe aeration of the starter. It is cheaper than a stir plate.

Waynep005 said:

i use an old wine jug for my starters just make sure you give it swirl every time you go by it for the first day. This will help tghe aeration of the starter. It is cheaper than a stir plate.

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That's close to what I do, but I am going to build a stir plate.

oboelestoe said:

... I started the yeast around 10 am and didn't pitch it until around 1 pm. ...

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Please clarify - 3 hours for the starter?

45_70sharps said:

What sort of temp are you fermenting at and did you check out what the yeast is supposed to be at?

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I'm fermenting at 68 degrees. Unfortunately, in the excitement of the moment, I didn't hang onto the yeast packet. I feel like I made a lot of mistakes with this first brew. :smack: Hopefully, next brew will go better...

remandsager said:

Please clarify - 3 hours for the starter?

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Yep, three hours for the starter.

Three hours isn't a chance for a starter to do any good.
If it was dry yeast, it did get to re hydrate.

Mistakes will happen. They will happen less with experience.
You will find that more often than not you still have beer that you can enjoy drinking.

What kind of yeast?
Liquid or dry yeast?
What was the gravity of the starter wort?
Did you swirl the jar real well to mix the yeast into liquid before you pitch?

A little more info will be very helpful.

It sounds like you're using dry yeast (guessing from the word "packet"). If so, did you really make a starter---i.e., add the yeast to a jar full of wort---or simply rehydrate in water?

If the latter, 3 hours of hanging out without any food is going to make the yeast pretty pissed off. It's hard to get solid numbers on many varieties of yeast, but on a wine yeast I've used a couple times, there is an instruction to pitch no more than 45 minutes after starting rehydration. That agrees with some information I've seen elsewhere for beer yeasts, so I think it's probably a fairly general goal. Either way, you probably didn't kill all your yeast, but you may well have knocked the viability down pretty significantly.
(here's some very useful information I just came across: http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=5863.msg70262#msg70262)

I've not ever had a beer take more than about 12 hours before krausen was evident, but if you're in a bucket fermenter you can't see that. While that's not encouraging, take solace in the sticky thread about fermentation taking up to 72 hours to begin. You've got a good day and a half to go before it's time to worry---it's probably not a great sign for your beer if it takes that long to get going (assuming an ordinary starting gravity and a typical ale yeast), but in the vast majority of cases the magic will still happen.

If you don't see bubbling after 72 hours, I'd carefully open the lid and see whether there's evidence of fermentation. It's quite possible that your bucket lid is not airtight. If there's really nothing going on at that point, I'd be strongly inclined to add dry yeast (whether you used dry or liquid to start).

I mis-spoke. I meant rehydrated, not starter, as it was a dry yeast. I read the post you linked to, Zeg (very helpful, BTW). I will wait until Wednesday morning and see if anything is going on. It seemed like there was some initial bubbling on the first day, but I am seeing nothing now... I guess time will tell. The OG was 1.064, in the range of what the instructions said: 1.056 - 1.064.

Dr. Cone seems to be saying that it should be OK, but not ideal. Am I interpreting this correctly?

"We recommend that the rehydrated yeast be added to the wort within 30
minutes. We have built into each cell a large amount of glycogen and
trehalose that give the yeast a burst of energy to kick off the growth
cycle when it is in the wort. It is quickly used up if the yeast is
rehydrated for more than 30 minutes. There is no damage done here if it is
not immediatly add to the wort. You just do not get the added benefit of
that sudden burst of energy."

Yes, it should be ok, it just won't take off as fast as it might have otherwise done.

Assuming you're using a bucket, those are rather unreliable for getting an airtight seal. It can happen that you have one at first, so bubbles go through the airlock, and between pressure, thermal changes, and being moved or bumped, that a leak develops somewhere else. I don't use buckets, but I saw this recently on a jug with a metal lid I'd drilled to install an airlock in. It bubbled the first day or so, then a leak developed somewhere.

It's nothing to worry about.

Thanks, Zeg. Any way to fix said leaks? Other than just pushing on the top and hoping for a proper seal?

As already mentioned, fermentation can take up to 72 hours to start and this will depend upon the yeast used, how well the wort was aerated and pitching at the proper rate for the said beer. Airlock activity only means the beer is off gassing and relieving built up pressure in the vessel. If there is a leak in the seal then the gas will escape somewhere other than the airlock.

You can take off the lid, check to see if there is krausen development and then re-seat the lid. You can even take a gravity sample to see if it is dropping. Gravity readings are really the only way to tell exactly what your beer is doing.

Afraid I can't offer much help, as I nearly always use better bottles. (My claim that the seals are unreliable is based on reading various posts around this forum, not direct experience with bucket fermenting.)

If I suspected a problem, I would probably press firmly all around the circumference of the lid. You can also test by slowly pressing down a bit on the center of the lid---if the lid is airtight, bubbles should come out through the airlock. (When you're done, release the lid SLOWLY so you don't suck liquid back out of the airlock, and don't do this if your airlock is overfilled!) If it doesn't bubble, you definitely have a leak. If it does bubble, you probably don't, but it's conceivable it's a slow leak that can't keep up with your pressing. (In that case, I'd expect you to get some bubbles when vigorous fermentation sets in for the same reason, though.)

At this point, I would not do anything further to try to seal it up. You're more likely to do harm than good, since a small leak won't hurt anything.

If you don't have obvious activity by now, get another pack of yeast and sprinkle it right on to the wort.

I see a lot of the "it can take 72 hours" posts on here, but I've never had a beer take that long to start weather using dry, vile, smack pack, or bottle harvest. Actually I've never had it take more than about 6 hours to get activity with the exception of a pack of S04 about a month ago. I can only assume it had been exposed to extreme heat or mishandled at one point and that killed it. Pitched some Bell's I had just washed the day before and off it went in about 3 hours.

Check the rubber seal around the airlock. I brewed a double IPA last weekend and thought it wasn't fermenting after 36 hours. Went and got more yeast but then realized there wasn't a good seal around the airlock. Applied some keg lube around the seal and it was bubbling away. Fermenting the whole time. Spray some starsan on the lid and see if there are bubbles

For those following what's been going on, I opened the lid this afternoon and...

TADA!

Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.

The oatmeal stout was black as tar and sitting there without the slightest glimmer of yeasty movement. Not even a bubble on top... :smack:

So, I decided to pitch the whole thing. When I did, there was a whole ton of dead yeast at the bottom of the fermenter (I had strained my beer, so most of the trub had been taken out). I had made some other mistakes with the steep-to-convert process and it just seemed like the whole thing had been a miserable failure. But I learned a whole ton about the process! I bought a new Brewer's Best Oatmeal Stout kit and re-brewed this afternoon. Everything went swimmingly. Yeast was only rehydrated for about 20 minutes before getting pitched into the dark, aerated worty waters. I'm excited. I felt about ten thousand times better about this brew than my first and I'm only out $50. No biggie.

So, a word to the wise (and not so wise, such as myself) never let your rehydrated yeast sit for 3 hours. It will die. Thanks for all of the advice.

Aww, that's too bad. Did you taste the "beer" before dumping it? If it wasn't tasting bad, you probably *could* have repitched without a problem.

But I don't blame you for starting over, I'd have trouble being excited about babysitting a beer I didn't have a good feeling about. Glad to hear your second try worked better! Isn't it amazing how much you learn from screwing things up the first time around?

zeg said:

Isn't it amazing how much you learn from screwing things up the first time around?

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It sure is. I can't believe how much more confident I felt about brewing this afternoon compared to Sunday. I was very Zen as I made sure my steeping water never went over 158F. I moved like a butterfly, then stung like a bee as I aerated my wort, pouring back and forth... back and forth. It was a thing of beauty.

I'll post again when I get to the bottling phase. I'm planning on substituting a little brown sugar for some of the priming sugar. Maybe 50/50. Does this sound like a good idea or... not so much? Should I wait until I have one under my belt before I start monkeying around with the ingredients? Or is that small substitution relatively safe?

oboelestoe said:

I'm planning on substituting a little brown sugar for some of the priming sugar. Maybe 50/50. Does this sound like a good idea or... not so much? Should I wait until I have one under my belt before I start monkeying around with the ingredients? Or is that small substitution relatively safe?

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I've never tried this, but from what I've read in several places, I would gently advise against it at this point. Mostly because it's additional complexity, and getting priming quantities right is important. For the first (or first-and-a-halfth) time around, I think it would be wise to stick to the simplest procedures from here on. There's a lot to think about on your first bottling day. Also, the flavor effect is going to be subtle, so there's not a big return on your "investment." I imagine you could get a similar effect by adding a bit of molasses to your beer near the end of fermentation (after boiling it in a small amount of water for a few minutes to deoxygenate and sanitize it)---that would not require compensation at priming time.

However, plenty of people use all kinds of different sugars successfully. (Here's one random thread, there are many others: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/priming-brown-sugar-61921/) There can be a subtle effect on the flavor, and it might go well in an oatmeal stout, so you do have a beer that's more amenable to the experiment than most.

If you do go that route, bear in mind that you need to adjust your priming sugar quantity depending on the type of sugar you use. I can't find a specific number for brown sugar, but it's basically cane sugar with molasses added, so the rule of thumb seems to be to treat it like cane sugar. This produces more carbonation per weight than corn sugar (dextrose), so don't just replace half the weight of your corn sugar with brown sugar!

preamble

oboelestoe said:

Hi all,
So I'm doing my first brew right now, an oatmeal stout, and I have a question about my yeast starter. I snooped around at the stickies and stuff first, but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. So, I started my yeast in a sanitized glass jar, laid some plastic wrap lightly over it, which seemed to be giving it some air and put it in a warm place. Now, here comes the hitch: I started the yeast around 10 am and didn't pitch it until around 1 pm. Now, about 30 hours into fermentation, I'm not seeing any activity in my air lock. So I am just wondering if it sat too long or something? :smack: I know I am being a worry-wart (or is it worry-wort, in these circles?), but a bit of encouragement/reassurance would be appreciated! Thanks so much! What a great community! Cheers!

Click to expand...

I did startup yeasts in a jar and in the end I gave up.

Because there is a better way that saves you days of time and yeast cells counts + viability.

At first I didn't think days meant anything, but it does. I used a stirplate, and had great success.

Why use a stirplate? Because of the oxygen it gives to yeast.

http://maltosefalcons.com/tech/yeast-propagation-and-maintenance-principles-and-practices

And how to get a stir plate?

You can buy one or build one. Unless you can dismantle computers, I recommend buying a stir plate.

zeg said:

I've never tried this, but from what I've read in several places, I would gently advise against it at this point. Mostly because it's additional complexity, and getting priming quantities right is important.

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Thanks for the sage advice and gentle nudge. I'll follow your advice and stick to doing it with the priming sugar from the kit.

Iambeer, thanks for that recommendation. I'll be purchasing a stir plate as my next gadget. After all, we are yeast farmers before anything else!