I pitched Lalvin D47 at 85 degrees, am I boned?

[StrongBad42]

Did my first mead tonight. Everything was perfect until I pitched the yeast. I was cooling the mead down with a ice water bath, but when I saw the yeast was done I just pitched it without thinking. I threw a thermometer in there to check it quick and it read 85. Am I going to need to repitch? Its a 2 gallon mead with an OG of 1.12. I rehydrated and pitched an entire packet

 

[PerryS]

You've ruined everything! Send the entire batch to me for proper bio-hazard disposal.


Sorry... couldn't resist. Your yeast is fine. Put the batch in a cool place to get the yeast down to 15C-20C where it likes to be. Yeast can produce off-tastes at higher temperature, but D47 is fairly clean and forgiving.

I remember severely under-pitching my first mead with D47 - took forever to finish. mrmalty.com has a yeast calculator which might help. For example, a 1.120 mead requires 400 billion cells, which is two of the 11.5g packets.

 

[landwaster]

It seems to be a common experience here that fermenting with D47 above 70 degrees will give you lots of fusels. I did x5 1-gallon batches last year of different honey varietals with D47, room temperature was probably around 70 plus the heat of the yeast, and I actually just bottled about an hour ago. All of the batches have that terrible fusel sort of taste to some degree and I almost threw them all out. Hoping that it will age out in a year or two but I'm not getting my hopes up. If I do mead again I'll make sure to keep the temp down, or use a different yeast altogether.

So I would drop the temp as soon as you can to whatever the optimum for D47 is and keep it there. If it hasn't been too long you're probably OK.