Wyeast 1762 dead? What have gone wrong?

[Jogurt]

So this is what happened to me during my last brewing session on sunday.

I was brewing a barley wine and planning to use Wyeast 1762 to see how that works out. I bought the yeast some 2 months ago from a certain homebrewin e-shop in Poland. The yeast arived pretty well packaged, no ice packs or anything similar though.

I smacked the smack pack while waiting for water to heat up for mash-in and mixed the inside carefully.

I waited for 3 hours and the package says, that after 3 hours there should be some swelling happening. After the 3 hours I am supposed to pour it in the wort, but I intended to do a mini-starter for the few remaining hours of brewing and separated about 1 liter (~1 quart) of wort to pour the yeast in.

However there was no swelling and when I opened the smack pack, there was no evident activity happening. Also it smelled pretty bad, after a while I coined it as rotten fruit.

Anyway, I poured it in the 1 liter of wort and for the next 3 hours nothing happened, so I dumped it all and used a dubious unnamed mead yeast I had laying around. Two days later and krausen is happening, so I should probably consider it a happy-end, at least for the time being.

MY QUESTIONS BEING:
- Do the liquid yeast usually have any other odors, not simillar to anything I am used to in dry yeast? Never used the liquid ones myself.
- Is it possible, that the yeast was still alive and I dumped a perfectly good yeast?
- When did the yeast probably die? They were packaged in October 2013 and manufacturer says they should keep for 6 months (in the fridge, obviously)

 

[eastoak]

the smell inside of a wyeast pack can be fruity funky even when it's fresh and it may or may not swell up in 3 hours. who knows if your yeast was viable but you could have made a starter and found out.

 

[kh54s10]

First of all the inner pack of a Wyeast Smack Pack it just nutrient to revive the yeast. For a Barley Wine you should have made a LARGE starter. It would need 18-24 hours on a stirplate or 2-4 days with intermittent shaking. Your yeast was quite old, and would have required an even larger starter than normally, but there is no saying whether it was bad or not since it was not propagated properly.

Your small starter did not have enough time to do anything.

I find that all yeast smells bad, others smell terrible. I would not make any decisions on a yeast based on smell.

 

[Jogurt]

Well the nutrient pack has been broken, about 4 hours passed, I poured it into a portion of the wort, another 4 hours passed until the end of the brewing session and there still was not any activity. Even when I shaked it up, there was no foaming, no nothing. I know, that 8 hours is a pretty short time, but I expected at least something.

And then there was the bad smell. Generally, I find the yeast smell not exactly attractive, but I do not find it repulsive either.
It is no coincidence that one of the most common beer descriptors is "yeasty" and it can have a number of interesting variations.
My yeast did not smell repulsive, just weird. It was a new smell for me, "rotten fruits" just being the closest I could think of.

Now I know, that I should have made a pretty big starter some 2 days in advance, but I simply forgot about it. Begginer's mistake.

My question is: Is there any sure way to tell, if the yeast is viable or dead? Right off the bat, before pouring it in anything. Say, without a starter.

Plus any personal experience with 1762 are welcome.

 

[eastoak]

you can look at a small sample under a microscope which is an instant test but many people, me included, do not have a microscope handy or make a starter 2-5 days before you brew. that yeast is pretty hardy so the chances that every cell was dead is remote unless something really unusual happened to it on it's way to you from the usa: freezing solid or extreme heat. it is possible that all or most of the yeast was dead of course. there are some commercial belgian brews that contain live yeast you could use to ferment your beer, you just have to use the dregs in a small starter and gradually build up the yeast.