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…
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 :))
Misread proportion, it’s 1dl/1.5l for starter, quite small sugar content indeed, should be fine even if it was somewhat spoiled