Recent content by Yeastmeister

A quick update: I had originally pitched old ale yeast, had little to no activity. I had wine yeast and bread yeast on hand to use. As advised, I used the wine yeast but it did not reach full attenuation, so I decided to pitch bread yeast to finish it off. I was concerned that the wine was a...

I used Red Star Classique which is a strain of saccharomyces cerevisiae. I found a research paper that says the following: The highest incidence of killer yeasts was found in the genus Hansenula (12 of the 29 strains examined). Saccharomyces, the best represented genus in the Collection, showed...

I assumed that much of the wine yeast would be dormant/inactive(?) at this point, allowing the bread yeast to do its thing. Anyway, I just went for it, I pitched around 8 or so grams of bread yeast.

The ale yeast that I pitched initially was old and did little to nothing in terms of fermentation. So after 11 days (the 20th), I pitched the wine yeast. I thought the beer was probably ruined or I would have just ordered an ale yeast. Now that it seems fine, maybe I should just buy an ale...

I had previously mentioned mold of some sort, but was unable to post pictures. Also, here is what it looks like today.

OK, so it's been 19 days, the fermentation has stopped. OG was 1.070, FG is 1.040, so I am a little under 4% ABV, I expected this to be 8.5% or so. I want to add the bread yeast to finish off the remaining fermentables. I've read maltotriose is not fermented by wine yeast. I tasted it and...

This morning, there is pretty good activity as a result of adding the wine yeast. I had read something similar, I believe they mentioned one yeast essentially cannibalized the other. It sounds like maybe I should give adding the bread yeast a shot or maybe I should just order some brewers yeast...

OK, wine yeast it is...

I am having trouble posting the image, I’ve confirmed my registration through email but that appears to be the issue... Anyway there were a number of floating circular mold spores, like lilly pads from hell. Dime to quarter size and shape. White fuzzy perimeter and a light blue center. It looked...

The image didn’t post last time, hopefully this works... I skimmed the floaties off the top with a sanitized spoon. I had a taste and basically it’s a sweet, pleasant and syrupy with very muted hop bitterness, hardly there at all, just a dull bland bitterness. I broke my hydrometer, so I can’t...

OK, so I’ve got a bit of an update. I had moved the fermentation bucket into my closet and hadn’t thought about it in a few days, then got thinking to I might just check to see if there was or had seemed to be any activity in the airlock. It did not appear to be the case so I decided to crack...

Yes, I thought about dry hopping. Today, I'm about 60 hours in and there is very little if any activity. I do see what appears to be a mostly solid 1/4" krausen, there is a faint yeasty smell, but mostly a very strong sweet wort smell. I am wondering if I should try pitching some more yeast. I...

Also, thanks you for the insight.

It sounds like I am going to have a malty beer... This was a good trial run to re-familiarize myself with the process. I have another "old" kit, an Oatmeal Stout. I plan to brew that next weekend. At least I'll be well prepared to quickly cool the wort down.

I brewed yesterday for the first time in probably 5 years. I brewed an extract kit Allagash Grand Cru kit. The kit was probably 2 years old. I thought that I had put the hops in the freezer, but apparently I had just left them in the box. The yeast pack was expired by a year (given the...