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I think I added dry yeast when wort was too hot

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panfist

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Hi-

So I just tried to brew with a Mr Beer kit for the first time today. The short version is I added dry yeast to my wort when it was 125 degrees fahrenheit.

Basically I was following the directions pretty closely, except I wanted to use filtered water. I didn't trust that my filter wasn't going to introduce some unwanted microorganisms, so I boiled it before using it. The Mr Beer container, being plastic, can't exceed temps of 140, so I waited until my water was 120 before pre-filling the container with the first gallon of water. I then made the wort, waited for it to cool a little and added the wort to the Mr Beer container. The temps climbed to 130 degrees, so I was still under the 140. I waited the 5 minutes that the Mr Beer process says to wait, and pitched the yeast...but in the Mr Beer process, the container is filled with cold water, not water that was boiled and cooling off.

I'm thinking that, following the normal Mr Beer process where you add the wort to cold water, the final temps are safe for pitching the yeast, but since I started with warm water, the finals temps were too high and I might have killed all my yeast.

I have one more packet of dry yeast that I can try to add, if you guys think that I killed the first packet. I just want to double check that adding more yeast won't screw up the brew.

Thanks.
 
Pitch the other pack, even if the first pitch is alive (probably not) it wont hurt a thing.
 
Probably was too hot, adding the extra can't really hurt. Beer is a lot hardier that all the instructions make it seem. You might only add a little bit of the packet for now, they're generally enough for 5 gallons, so a 2 gal Mr. Beer might chew things up faster than is ideal.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. In the mean time, my wort has been cooling outside in 30 degree weather. I'll pitch again when it gets below 80F.
 
below 70F is probably better. There should be a temp. range on the yeast pack, if not look on any brew supply web sight and find it there. Yeast are happy when treated well. Cheers:eek:
 
below 70F is probably better. There should be a temp. range on the yeast pack, if not look on any brew supply web sight and find it there. Yeast are happy when treated well. Cheers:eek:

Yeast do all the heavy lifting ... goto below 70, then pitch...treat them well, and they will reciprocate
 

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