I am unsure if there are any yeasties left after bottling... no carbonation so far.

Hi guys.

Just a quick question. What are the odds of leaving behind all yeast at bottling time so that there are no yeasties left for carbonation?

I did 2.5 week primary fermentation then bottled my beer. I made a normal batch of about 48 beers + 5 beers from the last 6" that I like to use as testers for seeing how it tastes in a few weeks after bottling. I opened a tester last week after 1.5 weeks in bottle, it had 2" of sludge in it. It was well carbonated and tasted great (overly carbonated even w/ all that sludge).

But this week I tried one beer, then another five days later. Zero hiss, no carbonation what-so-ever. But here's the weird part: I see no evidence of any sediment. I poured the entire beer into my glass, which I've never been able to do, and there was no cloudy anything at the end of the pour.

So what gives? I can of course wait it out for a few more weeks but something feels off. I didn't do anything different on this batch from any of my other 19 batches. Used Nottingham yeast which is my go-to house yeast. Bottled from primary after letting priming sugar sit for about half an hour. Is it possible that no yeast made it into most of these bottles?

I'm going to wait it out, but I'm just not sure what could have happened.

This is a vanilla bourbon porter that came in around 7.5%, nothing too crazy. Is it possible that we were *too clean* in bottling and just didn't pick up any yeast? I'd really rather not crack them all open and add a few sprinkles of new yeast, that doesn't seem right.

Thoughts?

I've left a beer in primary for 6 months and there was sufficient yeast to carb the beer. The problem is simply, it's not time yet. Your tester because it had sludge in it had less liquid for the yeast to actually carb, and probably also more yeast/volume of beer to do the job....

But no matter what the rules are always the same, a normal beer needs AT LEAST 3 weeks when at 70 degrees to carb a 12 ounce bottle of average gravity beer.

If you open bottles of beer before that, you're going to have flat beer, or beer that gushes or seems over carbed, or some bottles may be carbed while others are still flat. But 3 weeks or more is what it takes for everything to equalize across the batch.

The ONLY carbing issues there really are on here, tend to be patience issues, because in reality, carbing is fool proof. You add sugar, the yeast eats it farts co2 and carbs the beer. But it takes all the time that it requires to do so. 99.999999999% of the time, if it's failed to do so, the problem is not that there's a problem, but it's simply not ready yet.

Thanks Revy. All that makes sense. How possible is it that I had 0 yeast in suspension?

booherbg said:

Thanks Revy. All that makes sense. How possible is it that I had 0 yeast in suspension?

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You don't. It might be less than you're used to seeing but there is no chance there are no yeast there.

booherbg said:

Thanks Revy. All that makes sense. How possible is it that I had 0 yeast in suspension?

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It's impossible to have no yeast in suspension. There's billions of yeast in there.

That's what I've always thought. OK thanks for the confirmation. I'll wait it out. This will be good in 6mo anyway, I guess I should just stop worrying, relax, and have a different homebrew

How possible is it that I had 0 yeast in suspension?

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Did you count them?

Yeast are 1-10 microns in size. I found an interesting chart for comparison to help you with this one:

Yeast are about the same size as a red blood cell. Do you ever look at your blood and say "UH OH!! I don't see any red blood cells swimming around!!"

Yeast are about the size of smoke particles from combustion. Yes, when you see smoke, it is made up of tiny particles, and yes, they are about the same size as yeast.

Yeast are 8X smaller than the diameter of an average human hair.

Yeast are about the same size as a grain of corn starch. Go home and try to pick out a single grain of corn starch.

Anyway, you get the idea. When you pitch a single 11.5 gram packet of Safale S-05 yeast into your 5 gallons of beer, there are 6,000,000,000 yeast cells in that packet, and from there, there are going to be 2-6X that many by the time primary fermentation is done.

The flocculation rate will give you an idea of how many of those billions of yeast are going to clump together and settle down into the yeast cake, and how many are going to stay swimming around in solution waiting to be bottled for carbonation, but there are literally tens of millions of yeast in a perfectly clear bottled beer.

Good luck. This was my non-work at-work research project for the day!!

Thanks Topher, that was awesome. Really puts it into perspective.

So the tiny grains that I pour in from dry yeast, are those clumps of cells or something? Or are my blood cells that big?!

Revvy - that 6 month beer. Anything special about your bottling with that, like adding yeast? From what you've said I'm guessing not. I've got a 9month beer (typical gravity, just lazy on the bottling). iirc your typical method is to syphon to the bottling bucket after a primary ferment, and after moving the racking cane along the top of the trub to stir up a little yeast. If you can remember is that what you did? or probably did?

Yep, each "grain" is a clump of a metric sh*t-ton of yeast cells.....just like a single "grain" of sugar has about 1,800,000,000,000 sugar molecules!!

booherbg said:

Thanks Topher, that was awesome. Really puts it into perspective.

So the tiny grains that I pour in from dry yeast, are those clumps of cells or something? Or are my blood cells that big?!

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Yeah those are clumps of cells. Remember that there are a couple HUNDRED BILLION yeast in that packet. If every cell was as big as one of those grains, you'd need a little bigger packet.