Thanks, Revvy. I read that thread about a week ago and was thinking "ok, I got this! Nothing should go wrong." But then, I remembered the Ferm. can take up to 24-72 hrs to show signs thread and was like "well, it's been well over 72 hrs, something must be wrong!". I felt like such a noob to see what I had truly believed to be infected coming along just fine. Maybe it'll be easier to RDWHAHB once I actually have some homebrew to drink!
Well nothing really can go wrong in a closed enviroment after 72 hours as well...it's just that new brewers tend to rely on airlock activity like it were a calibrated machine or something....and we know that USUALLY within 72 hours krausen forms and gravity drops even slightly...so we want them to relax then open the bucket after 3 days...if you follow THOSE threads about 90% of the time, the see krausen....of the remainder about 9.5% of the remainders take a grav reading and have a drop in gravity.
Most of us who trust the yeast and who just pitch and walk away for a month, couldn't really tell you WHEN fermentation begins....or ends for that matter....and we don't really care. We trust the yeast to do what it's been doing since time began....
It's common, despite all the info we put out here, every new brewer thinks their situation/beer is unique. But that's rarely the case. No matter what YOU think might be different the basic rules are the same.
Wait 72 hours, take a hydro reading, THEN deal with the outcome. Which is usually slap your self silly for not giving the yeast the props it deserves.
Or in the "worst case" you pitch more yeast...no big deal...
I can't think of any situation where that basic premise would be change. It's a simple matter or ruling out the normal first it's the same with bottle carbing/conditioning, and why we tell people to wait a minimum of 3 weeks @ 70 degrees, before being concerned. In both cases you have to pass a window of the normal behavior time of living microorganisms.
And rarely, like .001% of the time does the yeast not do their job in that timeframe.
The idea of yeast "dying" or there being "bad" yeast is another one of those holdovers from bygone days (like before 1978 when it was legalizied in the states), when yeast was in cake form, of undetermined origin and traveled in the hot cargo hold of ships for months, and sat on grocer's shelves for god knows how long.
Then Charlie Papazian, and other authors wrote about yeast being "finnicky."
Which of course sews seeds of doubt in many a nervous new brewer.
But nowadays modern yeast rarely lets us down. It doesn't just "die" unless you dumped it in boiling wort and killed it. And it rarely doesn't start either.
