Fairly new to brewing. On Sunday I made my 4th batch of beer and when I went pitch my yeast, I noticed it was only a few weeks away from the expiration, but as I didn't have anymore yeast and the nearest brew store is an hour and a half away, I pitched it anyway. It was a wyeast Irish ale strain, and it did swell after popping the activator, but not as much as it usually does. Well 6 days later, it's still not active. Im wondering if it okay to pitch a fresh pack of yeast over the bad yeast a week after brewing?
Can I add a fresh yeast pack?
- Thread starter shane_lxi
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Have you taken a gravity reading? If it's been a week it might be done already.
Check the gravity, there may be no reason to pitch more yeast. If it has fermented you are wasting yeast at best and making a yeasty mess at worst.
Several years ago I tried to make a way to capture blow-off yeast to re-use. The first brew I used it on was with Notty. I saw no activity, I called the manufacturer, checked yeast batch numbers against problem yeasts,and searched everywhere to figure out my problem. At about day 3 I checked the gravity .......... It had finished; boy did I feel stupid. With the extra connections on the blow-off tube I had created a leak, so didn't see any airlock activity.
The first thing you need to do if you think you have an issue with fermentation is take a gravity reading!
The first thing you need to do if you think you have an issue with fermentation is take a gravity reading!
Based on what metric? Without a gravity reading there's simply no way to tell.
Yes, the ONLY activity that is an ACCURATE indicator of fermentation is a gravity reading....nothing else.
Fermentation is not always dynamic...just because you don't SEE anything happening doesn't mean that the yeast aren't happily chewing away at whatever fermentables are in there....the only way to know comes from gravity readings, and nothing else.
It could just as easily be bubbling or stop bubbling for that matter, due to changes in barometric pressure, temperature, or whether or not the cat or vacuum cleaner bumped into it, as it could be to because it's still fermenting.
Activity, action, bubbles, even krausen can be affected by the envoironment just as much as it being caused by the yeast...so going by that is NOT reliable.
If you want to know what's going on with your beer, then take a gravity reading. The only way to truly know what is going on in your fermenter is with your hydrometer. Like I said here in my blog, which I encourage you to read, Think evaluation before action you sure as HELL wouldn't want a doctor to start cutting on you unless he used the proper diagnostic instuments like x-rays first, right? You wouldn't want him to just take a look in your eyes briefly and say "I'm cutting into your chest first thing in the morning." You would want them to use the right diagnostic tools before the slice and dice, right? You'd cry malpractice, I would hope, if they didn't say they were sending you for an MRI and other things before going in....
Thanks for the help guys. Unfortunately I did not take an I initial gravity reading, so I have no benchmark. I did, however, move my beer into a warmer part of my house and it's active as hell right now, so I'm hoping that's a good sign. Winters get cold here, so I'm thinking it was just too cold for this yeast to work where I had it.
You don't need to take an initial gravity reading to know if gravity is falling, you take a reading, and take another reading a day or 3 later and if the number is lower, you have fermentation....also you can estimate it simply from your recipe. Especially in an extract batch...the gravity is foolproof.
