Safale US-05 Pitching Question

Hey everyone,

I've read directions about rehydrating before pitching yet I've seen videos and read where people just pitch it into the wort straight from the packet. Any advice? I've always rehydrated.

Thanks!
Mark

I've done both and could not really tell much difference. Re-hydrating should get the fermentation to start a little quicker though.

I am a lazy brewer..... I just sprinkle it on dry and it works everytime

kh54s10 said:

I've done both and could not really tell much difference. Re-hydrating should get the fermentation to start a little quicker though.

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Same here. Worked just as well pitching it dry as it did rehydrating it. I won't bother rehydrating it in the future.

ETA: Last batch I made by just tossing in the corny was within 5 points of FG in 3 days. @ 66 deg F

I let it go 2 weeks regardless.

Ok awesome thanks a ton. I'm going to be leaving it in primary for about 3 weeks anyway I think so I'm not worrying about the yeast being a tad sluggish. I just wanted to make sure my laziness wasn't going to screw up my 5 gallons tonight!

I think rehydration is the way to go. I boil 4 oz water and put into a sanitized container while steeping grains and let it cool covered with plastic wrap, also sanitized, while brewing. After my last hop/Irish moss addition at the last 15 minutes I put the yeast in the water, now less than 80 degrees and let it sit. After I put the chiller to the wort (15-20 minutes later) I stir the yeast mixture for a few minutes. I stir every chance I get until pitching time. This culminates into a fermentation that will nearly bring a tear to your eye.

Cheers!!
JW

Here I am all excited about getting to bed 45 minutes earlier and along comes wilsojos making me feel all guilty....

Haha just kidding. I'll see how I feel come pitching time.

Haha, I still consider myself a noob, so take it with a grain of salt and go to bed with a clear conscience.

I just toss it in, no issues so far.

I pretty noob-ish as well compared to most on here. But I also would recommend rehydrating. I brew almost all my beers with the 05 and I rehydrate. The basic consensus is that rehydrating ensures you get most all of the 230 billion cells in each pack. I have read more than once that you can expect about half of that when pitching it dry.

Plus, after you do it once or twice, it's really no more work than pitching dry. I actually just use tap water at 75-80 degrees into a sanitized container with sanitized lid. I know my water must not be too nasty because I never used to boil my water for top offs when I brewed with a smaller kettle.

A good and healthy fermentation with little to know lag time can only be a good thing, right?

If you don't re-hydrate, you are killing up to half you cells right off the bat and thus underpitching by a large margin. Dried yeast cells have a tough time with the high osmotic pressure of dense sugar solutions (wort) if not properly re-hydrated.

Will it work without re-hydrating? Yes, but you're not making the best beer possible that way.

People pitch on slurry cakes and still make good beer yet it is frowned upon as "overpitching" same thing with hydrating dried yeast-if it works for you keep at it,or try an experiment to see if it makes a diference by doing both. I hydrate, ive noticed a shorter lag time,but didnt notice any taste differnce.Scientifically(or whatever) its recommeded to hydrate first.I want whats best for yeast health so i hydrate.

I'm torn. The diligent brewer in mean is screaming for the rehydration, but the 5:00 AM wake-up call for a head-start on work is pleading for dry pitching.

FWIW, If you want 60% of your yeast to die, then do what most of the people that responded to your question do and pitch dry. If not then read on:

From Dr. Clayton Cone of Lallemand:
Let me give you some facts regarding rehydration and you can decide for yourself where you want to Compromise.

Every strain of yeast has its own optimum rehydration temperature. All of them range between 95 F to 105F. Most of them closer to 105F. The dried yeast cell wall is fragile and it is the first few minutes (possibly seconds) of rehydration that the warm temperature is critical while it is reconstituting its cell wall structure. As you drop the initial temperature of the water from 95 to 85 or 75 or 65F the yeast leached out more and more of its insides damaging the each cell.

The yeast viability also drops proportionally. At 95 – 105 F, there is 100% recovery of the viable dry yeast. At 60F, there can be as much as 60% dead cells. The water should be tap water with the normal amount of hardness present. The hardness is essential for good recovery. 250 -500 ppm hardness is ideal. This means that deionized or distilled water should not be used. Ideally, the warm rehydration water should contain about 0.5 – 1.0% yeast extract.

For the initial few minutes (perhaps seconds) of rehydration, the yeast cell wall cannot differentiate what passes through the wall. Toxic materials like sprays, hops, SO2 and sugars in high levels, that the yeast normally can selectively keep from passing through its cell wall rush right in and seriously damage the cells. The moment that the cell wall is properly reconstituted, the yeast can then regulate what goes in and out of the cell. That is why we hesitate to recommend rehydration in wort or must. Very dilute wort seems to be OK.

How do many beer and wine makers have successful fermentations when they ignore all the above? I believe that it is just a numbers game. Each gram of Active Dry Yeast contains about 20 billion live yeast cells. If you slightly damage the cells, they have a remarkable ability to recover in the rich wort. If you kill 60% of the cell you still have 8 billion cells per gram that can go on to do the job at a slower rate.

Hopefully this helps explains a little better why we rehydrate.

MarkIafrate said:

I'm torn. The diligent brewer in mean is screaming for the rehydration, but the 5:00 AM wake-up call for a head-start on work is pleading for dry pitching.

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What's stopping you from starting the process of hydration early, timing it out to pitch once your wort is ready?? That's what I do, it doesn't add any extra time for me.

Either way, I'm sure the beer will be good!

wolverinebrewer said:

From Dr. Clayton Cone of Lallemand:
Let me give you some facts regarding rehydration and you can decide for yourself where you want to Compromise.

Every strain of yeast has its own optimum rehydration temperature. All of them range between 95 F to 105F. Most of them closer to 105F. The dried yeast cell wall is fragile and it is the first few minutes (possibly seconds) of rehydration that the warm temperature is critical while it is reconstituting its cell wall structure. As you drop the initial temperature of the water from 95 to 85 or 75 or 65F the yeast leached out more and more of its insides damaging the each cell.

The yeast viability also drops proportionally. At 95 – 105 F, there is 100% recovery of the viable dry yeast. At 60F, there can be as much as 60% dead cells. The water should be tap water with the normal amount of hardness present. The hardness is essential for good recovery. 250 -500 ppm hardness is ideal. This means that deionized or distilled water should not be used. Ideally, the warm rehydration water should contain about 0.5 – 1.0% yeast extract.

For the initial few minutes (perhaps seconds) of rehydration, the yeast cell wall cannot differentiate what passes through the wall. Toxic materials like sprays, hops, SO2 and sugars in high levels, that the yeast normally can selectively keep from passing through its cell wall rush right in and seriously damage the cells. The moment that the cell wall is properly reconstituted, the yeast can then regulate what goes in and out of the cell. That is why we hesitate to recommend rehydration in wort or must. Very dilute wort seems to be OK.

How do many beer and wine makers have successful fermentations when they ignore all the above? I believe that it is just a numbers game. Each gram of Active Dry Yeast contains about 20 billion live yeast cells. If you slightly damage the cells, they have a remarkable ability to recover in the rich wort. If you kill 60% of the cell you still have 8 billion cells per gram that can go on to do the job at a slower rate.

Hopefully this helps explains a little better why we rehydrate.

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I have seen this before. The one thing I question is the recommended temps for rehydration. Why would Safale say in the instructions for rehydration, to use a much lower temp of 80 at plus or minus 6 degrees? Shouldn't they not only KNOW best, but want the best possible results to ensure more future sales?

I guess I have been that trusting the manufacture is the true expert, and going with their recommendations...

I'e mostly used dry yeast. And rehydrated a couple of times. Recently a witbier I did 10 days ago I rehydrated using s-33. I had planned a half hour~80 degree water that I put in tea kettle. Let it whistle. Took it out and poured into a teacup. Let it cool to around 80 degrees. Poured in yeast. Let i sit and soak. Waited 10 - 15 minutes. Stirred. Put in IC to sanitize the last 15 minutes. By the time I pitched, the yeast slurry had been acclimating the room temp., etc. for around 40 minutes.
I started rehydrating because of maily of what I had heard about rehydrating. Along of same lines as wolverinebrewer had mentioned and plus what's 10 minutes time or less during brew day, stirring, heating cooling water for yeast, etc.

rehydrating at 95 but pitching at 65 is a big difference.It can shock yeast too so im not really shure how to go about it except adding wort @80 deg before further cooling the wort to 65 which i have done many times.But latley i did 85 deg hydrate and 65-70 pitch.I dont know really the best way to go about it.
If there was any harmful reason to hydrate at 75 for 45 min instead i wouldnt know but that is ideally what i would like to do.

agentEhrman said:

I have seen this before. The one thing I question is the recommended temps for rehydration. Why would Safale say in the instructions for rehydration, to use a much lower temp of 80 at plus or minus 6 degrees? Shouldn't they not only KNOW best, but want the best possible results to ensure more future sales?

I guess I have been that trusting the manufacture is the true expert, and going with their recommendations...

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I suspect they are dumbing down the process to keep eager brewers from throwing 90-100F degree rehydrated yeast into 70 - 80 degree wort which would shock the yeast. I think the info is used to simplify the process for new brewers.

Just like beer kits say primary for 7-10 days, quicker return, it will work but not the best of practices.

Just a SWAG.

I have always used the Lallemand guidelines for beer and wine yeast and they are flawless. I have since switched to only liquid beer yeasts for a number of reasons but biologically, rehydration is essential.

Thanks for all the help and insights everyone. If it means anything I rehydrated and pitched a couple minutes ago. Brew time start to cleanup was about 4 hours. Thanks for all the help!

For future ref, Fermentis, the maker of Safale US-05 has this to say on the matter:
http://www.fermentis.com/fo/pdf/HB/EN/Safale_US-05_HB.pdf
Regards, GF.

If it only adds 1 extra step to the process, and you have nothing but time during the steep/boil/cooldown anyways, why not ensure that the yeast are optimized to the max by re-hydrating? I have done it both ways and found that I have faster fermentation when re-hydrating and better beer. Maybe the yeast didn't make a difference, but it doesn't take much effort to put 1 cup or whatever of 95 degree water into a container and toss the yeasties in. Let them sit for a half hour or whatever it takes to finish the wort and get it ready and toss them in. You'll probably have success both ways, but I'd personally prefer adding the 1 extra step to ensure a good quality product in the end. I don't want to waste 3-4 weeks of my time or money for something like under pitching or stalled fermentation or stressed yeast to screw it up.

I hate to point out the obvious here but when you pitch dry yeast on top of wort doesn't it rehydrate shortly thereafter?

:cross:

Seriously though, I've done it both ways and there is absolutely no advantage to "rehydrating" before hand that I can tell. I would actually advise against it since it adds to the risk of infection.

I find it interesting that the packages of the US-05 I get says to pitch dry, but the website suggests rehydrating. I have always pitched dry with great results, but if I can reduce my lag time and make sure my yeast are healthier you can bet I will be rehydrating from now on. It's easy to boil a cup of tap water while I'm doing other things and then cooling to 95 to rehydrate the yeast 30-45 minutes before pitching.

I don't rehydrate. My beers are great. The only way I would consider regularly rehydrating is if I had side-by-side comparisons favor the rehydrated yeast.

The re-hydration instructions for the US-05 call for constant stirring for 30 minutes – see excerpt below:
Re-hydrate the dry yeast into yeast cream in a stirred vessel prior to pitching. Sprinkle the dry
yeast in 10 times its own weight of sterile water or wort at 27C ± 3C (80F ± 6F). Once the
expected weight of dry yeast is reconstituted into cream by this method (this takes about 15 to
30 minutes), maintain a gentle stirring for another 30 minutes. Then pitch the resultant cream
into the fermentation vessel.
Alternatively, pitch dry yeast directly in the fermentation vessel providing the temperature of
the wort is above 20C (68F). Progressively sprinkle the dry yeast into the wort ensuring the
yeast covers all the surface of wort available in order to avoid clumps. Leave for 30 minutes
and then mix the wort e.g. using aeration.

I don’t have a stir plate, so I just pitched the dry yeast when I used it.

The Nottingham instructions don’t call for the constant stirring – just wait 15 minutes after sprinkling on top, then stir to suspend all the yeast. Next time I use US-05, I plan to re-hydrate using the Nottingham procedure. From some of the posts on this thread, it looks like it should work.

Personally, I rehydrate the US-05. It's really pretty easy and I start it while my wort is boiling so it's ready when I'm finished. I only stir in the yeast initially and then I don't touch it. It seems to reach the right consistency without much effort.

There was a BYO/Basic Brewing Radio Collaboration about this topic a few months ago. The article is in BYO's December 2011 edition and the BBR show aired sometime in January 2012, I think. Their conclusions were mostly that there is no significant taste preference between the two methods. Some people preferred the rehydrate samples, others the sprinkled samples, and some didn't detect a noticeable difference. Even those that had a preference noted the differences were very minor. So, you're probably going to be fine with either method. I think I just enjoy the mad scientist part of rehydrating as I'm able to watch the yeast solution grow and change consistency.

headbanger said:

I hate to point out the obvious here but when you pitch dry yeast on top of wort doesn't it rehydrate shortly thereafter

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Go back and read the part of the Safale quote about the importance of using water because of what passes through the cell wall initially. Pitching on top of wort and on top of water aren't the same thing.

I'm all for preference. I've also heard somewhere that the dry yeasts are designed that way. They give you more in a packet because, inevitably, some yeast cells aren't going to make it initially.
Again, I really haven't heard much. the LHBS say they just pitch it dry. Other people look at me funny when I say I pitch dry. I have not issues between going rehydrated or just pitch as is.

smyrnaquince said:

Go back and read the part of the Safale quote about the importance of using water because of what passes through the cell wall initially. Pitching on top of wort and on top of water aren't the same thing.

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Go back and read the part where I said I've done it both ways and it makes absolutely no difference, then drink another beer, then lighten the f up.

The rehydration isn't the same. If you need to throw "f" around, I think you're the one who needs to drink a beer and lighten up. Sheesh!

smyrnaquince said:

The rehydration isn't the same. If you need to throw "f" around, I think you're the one who needs to drink a beer and lighten up. Sheesh!

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Look man, the only point I am trying to make here is that I've tried it both ways alot more than once and according to my pallet there is absolutely no difference in the finished product. You're the one that came off with the why don't you go back and read it thing so I really don't see why you're surprised that someone would take exception and start dropping f's around.

Ive done close to 100 batches with US-05 and never rehydrated it. Its an amazing yeast and you absolutely 100% do not need to rehydrate it for great results. Its a super clean work horse of a yeast that never dissapoints. Ive won a few first place prizes with pale ales ive brewed with it that were not rehydrated

MarkIafrate said:

Hey everyone,

I've read directions about rehydrating before pitching yet I've seen videos and read where people just pitch it into the wort straight from the packet. Any advice? I've always rehydrated.

Thanks!
Mark

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Science people, science!!

Seriously though, this isn't neuro-surgery. If it tastes good, you did good. No one you give your beer to is gonna diss you because you didnt rehydrate your yeast.

Total noob (less then 15 batches total under my belt) I have pitched both dry on top and rehydrated. I haven't noticed a difference. Rehydrated for my Skrawberry Cream Ale last night just for S&G.