finally took the plunge

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

android

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 31, 2009
Messages
3,058
Reaction score
55
Location
Ames, Iowa
hey all, great site you have here, i've learned a ton already.

i just wanted to say hey and let y'all know that i very recently started my first batch. i've had the equipment for quite a while and finally got around to getting some ingredients and getting down to business. it was a great experience and i look really forward to the end result. i've got my wife convinced i'm crazy, i keep smelling the 'burps' of the air lock and man it smells tasty.

anyway, i was trying to do a fairly simple pilsner with all saaz hops and the lager yeast i had just wasn't doing anything when i added it to water and some dried malt extract. i even tried adding a tsp. of white sugar to get it going and it just never did much. i had an old packet of nottingham ale yeast i started just incase. anyway, i ended up using the ale yeast since it looked vigorous after proofing. i know this is OK but what kind of taste/alcohol % can i expect from a yeast switch? and of course i forgot to take an initial gravity reading, can i still do that after a day or so and go off that reading?

i love watchin' those bubbles come out of the airlock. sorry for the long post and thanks in advance.
 
Gosh, I can't wait to hear what Revvy or Yooper have to say. In the mean time.

A Gravity reading now won't give an accurate reading of alcohol, but will reduce the range of possible values. Probably drinking will tell more. I'd hate to waste the beer on it.

Mixing lager and ale yeasts... I don't know what to say about fermenting temps.
If you're confident your lager yeast was belly up, ferment as an ale, a little warmer.
If you're mistaken you may find a fruitier outcome.

If you ferment like a lager, your ale yeast should go to sleep, and if your lager yeast is still viable you'll have lager. If not, you can warm it up and let the ale yeast do its thing.

You don't say how long you waited for the lager yeast to start so I can't tell what is likely.

By all means let us know what happens.
 
sorry, should have stated that i ditched the lager yeast and used only ale yeast. i guess it just ends up an ale then?? i just wasn't sure the combo of the saaz and the ale yeast if that would give me some Frankenstein beer. thanks for your input.
 
Yes, it will be an ale. You are fermenting with an ale yeast, and I assume it's at ale temperature (65-70). That's not bad, in fact many "lager" kits come with ale yeast anyway because lots of folks don't have the temperature control to properly brew a lager. If you keep that Nottingham fermenting at 65 or so, it's a nice clean tasting yeast and you should be pretty close to your original intent. Closer to 70 or above and you'll probably get some ale fruitiness.

Was your lager yeast dry? When I rehydrate dry yeast I only use water, and I don't worry about whether it bubbles or not. Proofing should not be necessary if it's not expired. 20-30 minutes to dissolve and that's it. Dry yeasts should have a high enough cell count that you don't need to make a starter (and really shouldn't), but with liquid yeast you should make a starter with water and extract (as you described except the white sugar, it's kind of a no-no in starters), and it often takes 24-48 hours to grow.
 
thanks for the info. it is around 65, so hopefully it'll end up how i planned, if not, i'm sure i'll still be happy. it was dry and i'm a bread maker so i was expecting to see some action with the yeast, but it's good to know otherwise. i'm gonna stick with dry yeast for the first few and then look into some liquid.

again, thanks for the input, i appreciate you all willing to help out a greenhorn.
 
Its too late to take a gravity reading now. The yeast will already have consumed some of the sugar and turned it into alcohol. You are not the first (nor the last) to forget to take the original gravity reading so don't worry about it.

GT
 
If this was your first batch, I assume it is probably an extract kit that you are doing. For the original specific gravity, you can be fairly confident in the estimate that the kit gave you, or use software like Beersmith or ProMash to come up with a number. That number is really only important at this point if you want to know how much alcohol/calories you made. It is a lot more important later when you are trying to dial in your methods.

As was mentioned, it won't exactly be a pilsner, but you will most likely love it just the same. The first batch is usually pretty amazing. Watch the fermentation temperature and try to keep it below 70F. Take hydrometer readings starting about 10 days after you started fermentation and don't bottle until the gravity readings are the same for 2 days in a row. If you are planning on using a secondary to clear the beer a bit, that is the time to do it.
 
it wasn't a kit per se, the owner of our brew shop just had a recipe book sitting there and no OG estimate on the recipe. and i don't really care too much about how much alcohol is in it, i'll find out after i drink 5 of them in about a month and a half. it's sitting at 68 right now and i do plan to put it in secondary for a few weeks. as for gravity readings, do you guys just like to drop the hydro in the fermenter or use a test tube or something to take a sample?
 
The safest way is to remove a sample with a sanitary wine thief and measure the SG in a separate vessel. Feel free to sample the beer but don't put it back into your fermentor. It would be very difficult to get an accurate reading on a hydrometer dropped into either a bucket or a carboy just because of how you need to look at the hydrometer straight on at the level of the miniscus.

GT
 

Latest posts

Back
Top