Best Solution to Underpitched Batch?

[Carter1932]

For the first time I harvested some yeast from hombrew made a year ago. Took pacman dregs from about 4 bottles and fermented out three times over about a week.

After a week I was a bit suspect as to the quantity of the yeast, but against my own intuition I pitched it anyway cause I was insistent on using pacman. That was @ 9 pm Sunday evening (April 3rd). The first 24 hours was spent in a cellar @ 58 deg., yesterday evening I brought the carboys upstairs to warm. This morning @ 7 am (Apr. 5th) there still is no krausening @ 64 deg.

The top of each carboy only has a small cluster of bubbles, not sure if its yeast colonies, if it is its pretty damn small.

Just to be clear the wort is good; the OG is 1.066, its been fully oxygenated.

I was really wanting the pacman yeast for this beer since its essentially an attempt @ Dead Guy. Also, my plan was to subsequently pitch a barley wine on these yeast cakes.

Should I wait any longer, or go ahead and pitch some other yeast. If I wait longer, how much longer?

If I am to pitch something else, what would you recommend?

I generally shy away from dried yeast, but was thinking this might be a good time to use something like Danstar Notthingham. Whatever I pitch I would like it to finish clean, similar to pacman, and work well with the upcoming barley wine, and also ferment well @ 60 deg.

Thanks folks!

 

[kanzimonson]

Sounds like adding some dry yeast will be the easiest, but even if you do that, do you really want to pitch the cake into a barleywine? It doesn't sound like you have a very healthy culture of Pacman at this point and underpitching isn't going to help. Barleywines need a bunch of yeast at optimum performance.

 

[MalFet]

Two questions:

1) Are you sure the yeast was fermenting during your four starters?

2) Are you sure the yeast isn't fermenting now?

If the answer is yes to both, you might just have a very slow start due to extreme underpitching. I'd give it another day or two, and then repitch. You can buy Pacman from Wyeast (Brewmaster's Warehouse stocks it), or Nottingham would be a good option too. Culturing pacman from Dead Guy bottles is notoriously hard.

 

[Carter1932]

Two questions:

1) Are you sure the yeast was fermenting during your four starters?

2) Are you sure the yeast isn't fermenting now?

If the answer is yes to both, you might just have a very slow start due to extreme underpitching. I'd give it another day or two, and then repitch. You can buy Pacman from Wyeast (Brewmaster's Warehouse stocks it), or Nottingham would be a good option too. Culturing pacman from Dead Guy bottles is notoriously hard.

1. It was fermenting, but I'm think maybe my wort was too weak to get good growth. For whatever reason I went with a metric formula that I may have bungled. I'll have to recheck it. So, basically yeah it grew, but not much evidently.

2. Not sure, but if it is its the slowest I've ever experienced, but the low temps for the first 24 hours might have slowed the initial action.

I figured if I got a good ferment then I would have a good yeast cake for a barleywine, and its a lot easier than making a huge starter.

Guess I'll wait out another 24 hours and in the meantime see if I can find some pacman locally. Its a seasonal release so I was surprised to see it at Brewmasters Warehouse, wondering if its a year old?

 

[MalFet]

1. It was fermenting, but I'm think maybe my wort was too weak to get good growth. For whatever reason I went with a metric formula that I may have bungled. I'll have to recheck it. So, basically yeah it grew, but not much evidently.

2. Not sure, but if it is its the slowest I've ever experienced, but the low temps for the first 24 hours might have slowed the initial action.

I figured if I got a good ferment then I would have a good yeast cake for a barleywine, and its a lot easier than making a huge starter.

Guess I'll wait out another 24 hours and in the meantime see if I can find some pacman locally. Its a seasonal release so I was surprised to see it at Brewmasters Warehouse, wondering if its a year old?

To get something roughly 1.040, 1 gram of dme to 10 grams(/mL) of water. That said, culturing from dregs requires a rather different procedure. I've had best results starting in 50mL of 1.020 wort, and then stepping up by a factor of 5 in 1.040.

The only way you'll know if it is actually fermenting is by taking a hydrometer reading. Krausen doesn't mean much, especially when pitching rates are suspect. That said, for a significant under-pitch 4-5 days isn't unheard of, especially if it spent some of that time below 60ºF.

I'm with kanzimonson regarding the yeast cake. I'm skeptical about pitching onto yeast cakes even in the best of circumstances, and these aren't the best of circumstances.

All that aside, if your sanitation was okay I bet you'll get some good beer out of this.

 

[Carter1932]

That's the formula I used, maybe I wasn't using my scale correctly. It was stepped it up from around 400 ml to 800 ml and eventually it pitched about 2 qts. slurry after cooling and pour off excess beer.

I have had good success pitching directly on old yeast cakes, provided you go from lighter to stronger beer and not the reverse. May not do it to with this one however, guess it will depend on the final taste of product.