blue800
Well-Known Member
So I started a ~150ml yeast starter last friday from a small canning jar (those half pint ones) of saved german ale yeast from december. I can only get LME from my homebrew shop so I mixed up a gallon or so and canned or froze most of it. I didn't pay a lot of attention when I took the gravity reading, but it was between 1.047-1.042. Saturday morning I stepped it up to ~750ml and hooked it up to an aquarium pump (through a filter) to oxygenate and agitate the culture.
It appeared that sunday night I had some krausening going. This morning I cold crashed the starter because I knew I was brewing tonight (took it off the air supply and put it down at ~38 degrees). Brewing went pretty smooth, as I was cooling the wort I pulled the starter out to warm up (It was in a 2 liter bottle with the cap on tight). The bottle got pressurized pretty quickly and I opened it twice before everything was finished to off gas (and got that pfftst sound both times) and there as a healthy layer of trub with a thick white layer.
I poured some of the top of the starter in my test glass and it foamed up like crazy... so I figured because of the increase in trub, and the krausening and the off-gassing when it was warming up that I had a healthy culture, and I pitched the rest of it in my wort (I was hoping to just pitch the trub...but 1007 is a poor floccing strain so I pitched the whole thing). The punchline is that the final gravity of the starter was 1.042 (about where it started)!
It also smelled somewhat like yeast, but was much stronger of that oxidized cardboard smell.
Sorry for the long story... question is this. Would you trust there are viable yeast? Should I wait 72 hours? Or should I pitch my backup Notty just to be safe? could the off gassing have just been from warming up and releasing the dissolved gasses?
It appeared that sunday night I had some krausening going. This morning I cold crashed the starter because I knew I was brewing tonight (took it off the air supply and put it down at ~38 degrees). Brewing went pretty smooth, as I was cooling the wort I pulled the starter out to warm up (It was in a 2 liter bottle with the cap on tight). The bottle got pressurized pretty quickly and I opened it twice before everything was finished to off gas (and got that pfftst sound both times) and there as a healthy layer of trub with a thick white layer.
I poured some of the top of the starter in my test glass and it foamed up like crazy... so I figured because of the increase in trub, and the krausening and the off-gassing when it was warming up that I had a healthy culture, and I pitched the rest of it in my wort (I was hoping to just pitch the trub...but 1007 is a poor floccing strain so I pitched the whole thing). The punchline is that the final gravity of the starter was 1.042 (about where it started)!
It also smelled somewhat like yeast, but was much stronger of that oxidized cardboard smell.
Sorry for the long story... question is this. Would you trust there are viable yeast? Should I wait 72 hours? Or should I pitch my backup Notty just to be safe? could the off gassing have just been from warming up and releasing the dissolved gasses?