Question on yeast

[DanInMadison]

Saturday, I brewed an Alaskan Amber clone (recipe from Brew Your Own magazine).

For some reason, the Wyeast smack pack never swelled much. LHBS were closed yesterday, so I couldn't get a new smack pack.


I decided to open the pack and pitch the yeast contents into the primary.

Yesterday afternoon, I remembered having a Nottingham dry yeast packet. I followed the directions and pitched this into the primary as well. This morning, there was more krausen than I've seen in my previous 3 batches.


1) Did I do the right thing or should I have waited to see if the initial yeast would have started the primary fermentation?

2) If I kept things sterile, will I be ok as far as beer flavor?

Dan

 

[Evan!]

There's no way of knowing which yeast cells (Notty vs. whatever Wyeast strain you pitched) are doing the majority of the work, but yeah, you'll be fine as far as flavor goes. I love notty, use it all the time.

In the future, don't rely on the swelling of the wyeast packs to tell you anything except a general idea of the viability of the yeast. Make yourself a starter whenever using liquid yeast---one or two days prior to brewing, boil up some malt extract with water, cool it down, put it into a sterilized container, and pitch the yeast from the packet or vial in to it. This will give it a headstart and allow it to multiply to a much greater cell count.

And after pitching that into your actual beer wort, give it at least 3 days before you give up and resort to plan B...

 

[david_42]

I would have waited 72 hours. At this point, I'd bet on the Nottingham dominating the ferment, but it's a neutral yeast that should be fine for a Red.

 

[idkid]

+1 on making a starter.

I often have difficulty getting smack packs smacked (wow...say that five times as fast as you can!). On my last batch I had a smack pack that barely swelled, so I decided to do a starter in case it was bad. Well, when I went to pitch into the starter, I found that I had barely punctured the nutrients pack inside. So the reason it only "barely" swelled was because of the fact that I didn't get the nutrients mixed in. Once I did the starter it was obvious that I had good yeast. Chances are you had good yeast too. I bet both are acting on this beer, which could be the reason why your fermentation was more vigorous than usual. If I had pitched directly into the fermenter it still would have been fine, but the starter showed me that I definitely had viable yeast.

 

[DanInMadison]

Thanks for the advice.

Just added a Yeast Starter Kit to my list of items to buy from AHB.