Please help! Did I just kill my yeast?

[Beardedterror]

Hello all! Noobie here. I've just finished getting my 2nd batch ever into my primary, and have corrected a lot of the mistakes I made the first time around. However, I'm afraid I might have killed or damaged my yeast. After I got my wort into the primary bucket, I added the cold water and I got a false temperature reading of 67 degrees farenheit, so I pitched my yeast (dry ale yeast, without a starter). 6 hours later, I checked the bucket again, and the thermometer says the bucket is 79 degrees. I know this isn't a really high temperature, but it's not in the range it should be for ale yeast. Have I done any damage? What should I do?

Thanks in advance!

 

[MalFet]

Any guesses as to what temp it was when you pitched? Probably didn't kill the yeast; far from it...most yeast prefer temps around 100ºF. That said, what the yeast want is not what makes good beer. 79ºF is not really a temperature you want to be fermenting at for most styles (let alone whatever you were at 6 hours ago). Do what you can do to get the temps down relatively quickly.

 

[Revvy]

You're fine, you cant really hurt your yeast until you are in your hundreds. Just make a swamp cooler or something to bring it down to the 60's if your ambient isn't at the temp and it will cool off on it's won.

 

[cowboybrody]

I had the same problem. I pitched mine at 86. I was freaking out ...but I talked to some good people on here. They basically told me , let things run there course. Nothing you can really do about it, but let the yeast work.

 

[Malintent]

worse case scenario is that your yeast jumped into hyperdrive and generated a bit of phenols.. the good news is twofold.

1) 6 hours from dormant is not enough time for the yeast to have done much of anything but wake up and say, "gee, seems warm out today.. but it is cooling down nicely".
2) phenols get cleaned up over time anyway... so if you don;t rush, it will be fine even if it was higher temperature for longer.

PS.. you CAN ruin beer by fermenting too high.. .but not for a few hours.. or even a day.

 

[Beardedterror]

Thanks all! I got it down to 64 as quickly as I could, and fermenting seems to be doing well.

 

[Gordzilla]

along the same lines of killing/damaging my yeast. Im currently making a hard lemonade its been fermenting for 2 weeks now so i decided to add 2 more cans of frozen pink lemonade concentrate to my primary. My idea was give the yeasties more sugars to eat to drive my ABV up, I allowed the cans of lemonade to sit on the counter for a couple hours i thought they were thawed out all the way. Meanwhile i was making a edworts apflewine which i was using lalvin ec-1118 yeast. I had to packages of exc-1118 so i added 1.5 to edworts and the other .5 to the lemonade along with the semi-frozen pink lemonade. Will the cold temps of the frozen lemonade concentrate damage my yeast? its been 3 days now since adding the lemonade concentrate i had expected to see some more fementation activity showing in the airlock by now.