No fermentation in secondary (with fruit added)

[bigpal]

I made a hefeweizen, got great fermentation after only 12 hours. After five days, I racked to secondary. After less than 24 hours in secondary, I added some blueberry extract I made myself. I pasteurized the fruit and cooled it to room temp before adding.

I did not take any of the yeast cake from the primary, and the beer smelled great coming out of primary (healthy beer). I had it in a room at about 64-68 degrees in the primary, and just yesterday I moved it 70-72, hoping to "wake up" the yeast. Racked with fruit on Saturday morning, and it is now Monday afternoon, NO ACTIVITY whatsoever. Usually the fermentation is wild when I add the fruit...

Ideas? Will repitching even work? Won't the alcohol kill the new yeast? I tried lightly stirring yesterday. I'm out of ideas but don't want to lose the batch. I don't have any yeast from the primary, or any starters with my favorite WLP300.

Thanks in advance.

 

[sjbeerman]

I did something similar recently for a Raspberry Wheat I have going right now. After about 5 days, I already had 76% attenuation. I then gently stirred up the yeast and racked on top of 3 lbs of raspberry puree. Fermentation restarted in about 4 hours or so.

Are you basing the lack of activity from the airlock or can you see through the secondary that there is no activity? You could possibly add some dry yeast because you should have plenty of simple sugars present. However, I would think there would be enough yeast in solution to get things moving again without any additional yeast.

 

[bigpal]

Yes, my airlock logic is flawed, because I can't see into the bucket... I ran out of carboys. I'm basing airlock activity only on the fact that usually the huge amount of sugars in the fruit causes massive airlock activity (last time I had a hose/bucket situation). I may have no choice but to try to pitch yeast again and hope it works out. I'm going to wait another 24 hours, which will be about 72 hours in total.

 

[thughes]

Well, you did measure gravity after you racked it on the fruit, correct? How much has it dropped since then?

 

[bigpal]

This is why I'm a novice brewer.. I didn't check gravity before racking to secondary. I'm going to check this evening and then intermittently check following that.

BTW, how does adding fruit like this affect FG? If I add heavily concentrated fruit, will it make it a high gravity beer? I was debating what OG to hit when brewing initially, whether I should go higher or lower to account for the fruit I was going to add. In the end I went with 1.046, which was just below my target of 1.048. The fruit juice was fairly watered down, I used half a gallon of water mixed with 3 lbs of "smashed" fruit... filtered it, and added.

I've done this before, and I added the fruit juice directly to the primary just after it began fermenting. I am doing it this way because you couldn't really taste the fruit last time, although the beer itself turned out great.

 

[sjbeerman]

Yes, my airlock logic is flawed, because I can't see into the bucket... I ran out of carboys. I'm basing airlock activity only on the fact that usually the huge amount of sugars in the fruit causes massive airlock activity (last time I had a hose/bucket situation). I may have no choice but to try to pitch yeast again and hope it works out. I'm going to wait another 24 hours, which will be about 72 hours in total.

I didn't see any airlock activity after it restarted from racking on the fruit. However, I could see about 2 inches of krausen through the bucket.

For the entire fermentation, I didn't see any airlock activity whatsoever. This is the first time this has happened in all the batches I have done and I double and triple checked the seal on everything. I guess it just shows that you can't really rely on airlock activity alone.

 

[coypoo]

Just open the bucket up and look inside to see what is going on. You wont ruin anything by opening it briefly