Used washed yeast for the first time...quick fermentation?

So I finally got to use one of my washed yeast mason jars for the first time. It is WL004 (Irish Ale), about 3 weeks from harvest. I had about 1.5cm of yeast at the bottom of the jar. I used a 400ml starter with 1/2 cup of DME. I made the starter the morning of my brew (Saturday AM). By the time I was going to pitch (Sat PM), the krausen was very high. I pitched it into my partial mash wheat beer (5.25 G) with an OG of 1.069. The next morning I was a little worried as there was no action in the blow off tube. By that evening it was bubbling away. On Monday afternoon, I noticed that there weren't any bubbles coming out of the blow off, so I removed it and replaced it with an airlock. I saw a bubble, so all was good. This morning (Tues am), there were no bubbles at all. I thought something was off, so I checked the gravity...it was 1.018! Has anyone else experienced an extremely quick fermentation when using washed yeast?

Sadly, I've had something ferment that fast, but not because of harvested yeast. Unfortunately in my case it was because I didn't have good temperature control and it got too warm. The yeast went nuts and produced a bunch of fusel alcohols. You could get a headache with one sip.

That sucks. Mine is fermenting around 73, which is warmer than I would like, but hopefully not high enough to do what yours did.

I just pitched my first reused yeast the other day. It was WLP300 Hefe and I rescued it from the bottom of a bottle, got a starter going, and then had to go out of town for three weeks. It looked fine when I returned, so got it going again with some fresh starter wort and pitched to my first AG batch on Saturday. I pitched a little high, it was about 78F but I stuck it in the basement with a wet blanket around it and by about the 18 hour mark it was down to the mid sixties and now it's stable at 62. The airlock is just bubbling away and had a bit of a blowout last night.

Hopefully it'll turn out as good as I hope, for my first AG I was shocked to see that I hit my OG exactly on the money at 1.054 (dunkelweizen) and my efficiancy with batch sparging was 73%.

digphish said:

That sucks. Mine is fermenting around 73, which is warmer than I would like, but hopefully not high enough to do what yours did.

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Ambient or wort temp?

73 is the temp of the wort according to the liquid crystal thermometer thing on the side of my bucket. It is in my basement which stays 68-73.

73 is the upper range for the yeast . Hopefully the beer wasn't higher than the stick on thermo . You might want to look into a swamp cooler I use them all time, very effective at cooling the fermentation down . I can keep low 60's with no problem.