First total failure of my homebrew journey, and I have no idea why… I was really looking forward to this brew, a pitch-black stout with smoked wheat, chocolate malt and black malt. For yeast, I was anticipating to try Alzymologist’s speciality.
However, it’s been four days in the fermenter and I’ve pitched three yeasts – first the Alzymologist (made a starter), then my usual fresh yeast without a starter and for the last desperate attempt some dry wine yeast – I can only come to the conclusion that my wort is poison. Not a sliver of CO2 has been produced. First yeast did produce heat in the wort for a day, but no CO2. Tried heating the wort, agitating and all, but it remains dead.
Some little changes in my process were made – 18 liters instead of 19 for mashing so that I could fit 900 grams extra malt in, and strike temperature up by one degree to 72 °C due to less water and more grain. Tomorrow evening I’m going to have to dump 20 litres of fine wort down the toilet and plan another brew day. Damn, this loss hits like having to bury a pet…
Wait! Don’t throw it all away, I want to know! Can you sample like 50ml of that poison and send it to me?
Don’t throw it out yet. Buy a hydrometer and look into your temperature control. Your other equipment sounds expensive, a hydrometer is far cheaper than your other stuff or throwing out a wort. (I had to learn the hard way that ferm temperature is everything, regardless of the cost or quantity of my yeast.)
Thanks for the encouraging words :) I guess this one is a goner though, it strangled a fourth pitch of a starter that was certified going strong when I put it in. Even if that stuff did eventually ferment, I’m not sure if I’d dare drink the cursed brew XD
I’ve been trying different temperatures, too – the setup is not super expensive per se, but it is versatile in that I have the fermenter insulated and can both cool and heat it with an automatic temperature controller (to heat it I borrow wife’s hair dryer, it’s there now holding 23 °C :D ). My usual fresh yeast is super easy in that regard, I’d normally allow a couple of hours after pitch at the ~25 °C that the wort tends to stand at at that time and then set the thermostat to 15 - 18 °C for the entire bubbly bit, so normally all I need is cooling against heat produced by the yeast.
Did you take a gravity reading?
+1 for gravity reading.
Also 4 days is nothing, give it a week or two at least.
No, I don’t have means to measure that other than carrying the kettle and fermenter around :) Gotta get a meter one of these days.
The main ingredient in any brewing is patience. I hope you’ll give it time. It hasn’t ever happened to me but I have heard stories of worts that fermented this way. Think of a number of days you’d consider waiting for results, double it, and add a week. While you wait, buy a hydrometer.
Well, I’ve been brewing with a very settled process for a couple of years, and in my experience the fermentation will always have begun by the morning after setting it up. The primary reason I haven’t been taking gravity readings is because I don’t want to lose any of the good stuff (would not pour the OG sample back in), and since my brews tend to just work, I never needed analysis to troubleshoot either.
I have a threshold valve on the gas breather line, so I can see on a meter if pressure has accumulated, plus a water lock after the meter to show the escaping gas. These have been my references regarding fermentation.
Hmm. My one time I had a completely stuck fermentation like this, I tried a bunch of stuff like messing with the pH and repitching. The only thing that eventually worked was starting something new and pouring the old batch on top of it at the peak of the ferment. It came out okay in the end. Only bothered because it was like $90 of orange blossom honey at stake.
Silly question, but you did actually include malts which produce sugars that can ferment? I brew by the seat of my pants quite a lot, but I always take an OG reading.
I think too that this is it, those malts op listed, while carrying a lot of flavour, do not have many enzymes, op might not have converted enough starch
There’s 5 kilos of active malt (Simpson’s Maris Otter Pale and Viking smoked wheat which they say can be used like pilsner malt), 1,9 kilos of roasted non-active stuff. And it’s sticky sugary. Grain bill then is not a problem.
Boil it again to kill that wine yeast, pitch some dry ale yeast once it reaches ale temps. Leave it for a week and don’t look at it.
Sorry for your loss. I was waiting for this brew too!
Did the starter start though?
What was the grain bill? And in starter?
Let me know if you need another tube! Amount in that package should be enough for typical batch even without starter, although making a starter is always a good idea. This strain usually starts within hours.
Yeah, such a bummer… It might be the syrup in the starter that has gone bad, I ended up using leftovers there. The starter was 1,5 litres of filtered & boiled water with 1 dl of dark sugarcane syrup and some yeast nutrient dissolved in. It was at 26 °C when I let the yeast onboard. I only had the starter going for an hour, no activity was seen in that time but I wasn’t really looking either.
The grain was:
Simp Maris Otter Pale 3800 g Viking Smoked Wheat 1400 g Viking Black Malt 700 g Viking Choc Light 1000 g… two top lines are active. And I WILL brew this again :D
Now here the most suspicious part is yeast nutrient. Like any fertilizer, it does turn into poison when used excessively, especially in first hours of adaptation when cell machinery is being adjusted to new environment. One hour starter is too short even for 1 budding, but induces extra state transition stress onto yeast. Proper starter time should be at least 6 hours, 24 is recommended, to drive yeast to exponential-plateau transition region. Short starters are useful for rehydration of dry yeast; of course, no budding or multiplication happens there - and thus best medium for dry yeast rehydration is sterile (or boiled) water with no food nor nutrient.
Nutrient dosage might be surprisingly hard problem in small volumes, as many products are powdered mixtures of various compounds, naturally as homogeneous as you’ve mixed them, and with size of particles getting close to size of dose, it’s easy to skew composition just by sampling.
You’ve probably got around 40% sugar in that syrup solution, which is higher than what I use for sweet mead recipes. I’m not sure lager yeast can tolerate this gravity, although it could, I was just planning to explore that dimention this year, mead on beer yeast.
Neither of this explains later yeasts not starting, unless there was enough nutrient to make whole batch salty. Let me know if I can help you troubleshooting this system further, I’m sad and curious now.
That was a super inspiring read, thank you! I’ve been wary of keeping starters going for long, expecting them to foam their way out of the bottle before I have a place to put them. Next time I’ll make the starter first thing on brew day. Watching these processes is a great way to learn and get a feel for things, and I never get to see what happens in the steel fermenter. Made the birch sap cava in a plastic container and it was the first time I got to see what happens in the process.
As for the sugary starter solution, I can report that the basic fresh yeast from the grocery store (I’m sure you know Suomen Hiivan tuorehiiva) has thrived in even more saturated starters, I’ve been going with 1 dl of syrup in 1 litre water before. And the nutrient was just a pinch into the starter. I get that stuff in satchets made to serve 20 litres of wine juice.
Yesterday I made one last try at a starter with the fresh yeast. I kept it for five hours, and it was very much going and foaming when I pitched it. Also put a heater in to keep the insulated fermenter at 23 °C. It’s been 18 hours since pitch now and so far it looks like the Moloch in my brew has taken another victim. Oh well, weekend on the way and it looks like Saturday I’ll have the house to myself. Looks like a brew day :))
A pity I can’t throw you a tube of yeast this fast! Good luck!
Misread proportion, it’s 1dl/1.5l for starter, quite small sugar content indeed, should be fine even if it was somewhat spoiled
What makes you think it’s not fermenting if you can’t take a reading? What are you fermenting in? Is it possible it is going but you just have a leak?
I have a threshold valve on the gas breather line, so I can see on a meter if pressure has accumulated, plus a water lock after the meter to show the escaping gas. These have been my references regarding fermentation. No leaks there :)
K, yea sounds similar to my setup. I’ve had issues where the fermentor lid wasn’t seated right and gas leaked before where you’d see the bubbles. Just a thought. I assume you opened it up and there’s no foam?
Yes, I’ve opened it a number of times now and absolutely no foam… Did one last pitch with a starter that I kept an eye on for five hours and it was very much going strong by that point. Yet that too succumbed to the void :[
The thing I like most about this kind of setup is how after the yeast is pitched and the pressure lid is closed, you don’t open it again until all the beer is gone… the peace of mind that the beer is kept hermetically in a steel vessel in a protective CO2 atmosphere. There have been a couple of second pitches in the past, and I’ve kind of branded those batches as second grade simply because I had to open the holy seal and re-pitch :D
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