So I'm not going to be using this starter

[Paddle_Head]

Kind of annoying.

Bought a smack pack of Wyeast 1318 from the LHBS about a month ago, in preparation for making Orfy's Boddington Bitter.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f64/boddingtons-bitter-21131/

The yeast was manufactured in July, can't recall the exact date. Anyway, I took it out of the fridge about 6pm on Wednesday night. Smacked it about 7pm. By 10pm it hadn't seemed to have swelled at all. Regardless at about 10:30pm I pitched it into a 1L starter and set it on my stir plate.

24 hours later I checked it out, in anticipation of a vigorous starter. What I saw was very little CO2 bubbling, and not much color change indicating alot of yeast in suspension. The starter was pretty warm, ~85F since my stirplate seems to run a bit hot, but I've had other strains run that hot w/o issue before. But most noticeable was the smell. I didn't smell like beer, rather sour spoiled food with a hint of vinegar.

Discouraged, I put it in the fridge overnight to assess what yeast would fall out. This morning it still smelled terrible, and the amount of yeast on the bottom of the flask wasn't what I would have expected for that size starter. To be double sure I had a taste of the decanted solution, and yuck. Tasted just like it smelled.

I'm assuming this is a just a bad pack of yeast, that went south on me, mostly due to it not swelling after the smack. Anyone think of anything else I should be looking at?

Since I clearly won't be brewing tonight, any fun experiments to recommend I should try with this starter? Like harvest the floculent vs the non and see if one smells worse than the other?

 

[wyzazz]

Swirl it all up and drink it! I Double-Dog-Dare you!

Sorry about the starter, that's a real bummer.

 

[kanzimonson]

That's too bad.

I have a question: why do you smack it and then wait to pitch into a starter? I've always smacked the nutrient pack and then immediately opened and poured everything into a starter. I figure the nutrient pack is just as beneficial in the starter as in the package. Of course, I guess this time you got an early indication that something might be amiss.

HOWEVER, I'm not 100% willing to give up on the yeast yet and here's why:

1) I don't really think my starters smell great, or even very beer-like.
2) We have to trust that Wyeast does a good job with sanitation in their packaging.

So a smelly starter isn't a single reason to throw it out. But the reason I have point #2 is because even if a smack pack has a reeeeeally low viable cell count (because of age), it does still have some viable cells in there. In those cases, I feel like you really have to do some multi-step starters to give those few living yeast a leg up.

So unless you've already gotten rid of it, I think you should decant and make a second starter with whatever's left. Hopefully your yeast are still the only things in there...

 

[Paddle_Head]

No particular reason to let it swell, just figured it wouldn't hurt.

I like the optimism about making something useful from this stinky goop. So I'll have another go at making a good starter out of this. At this point it's been in the fridge for 24 hours, so pretty much everything has dropped out of solution. I'll probably swirl it up a bit, then let it sit for 20-40 minutes. Hopefully the only stuff that will drop out first will be yeast.

I'll let you know what happens.

 

[Paddle_Head]

Decanted a bit into a ball jar I sanitized with star san. Stuck that in the fridge, in case I want to try to do something with it later.

The rest I dumped except the very last bit of yeast that had flocked to the bottom of the flask. I dumped a 500ml starter on top of that and put it on the stir plate. We shall see what happens.

 

[passedpawn]

Let is swell. If it doesn't don't pitch. That's the idea.

Starters usually smell bad.