Thursday, September 10, 2015

Inadvertent Experiment

When moving my fermentor, with the wort from my recent batch of "Keep On Ryedyn", to my new fermentation chamber, I make a mistake. Not the 'whoops, i put this in the wrong spot' kind of mistake, but the 'Oh, No! I pitched my yeast starter too early kind of mistake.

The yeast starter was on a stir plate in the fermentation chamber. So to get the wort in, I had to move the starter out. I also had to clean up the mess from the stater. So when I took the starter out I poured it right into the wort. Totally forgetting that the wort had only cooled to 90F. I put the fermentor in the chamber, closed it up and started the temperature controller to my desired temp 18.7C. I bought a Celsius only temperature controller for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.

Two days later there was still no sign of activity in the fermentor. So last night I turned off the temp controller and let it all sit. I figured since I had effectively killed all my little yeast friends, I would let the whole thing sit for a day. I went to the homebrew store and picked up a smack pack of yeast. At lunch time I smacked it to activate the yeast and by the time I got home, it was good to pitch.

When I opened the fermentation chamber, I noticed there was finally activity. So what did I do? I poured in the new yeast anyway.

Thus it's now a little experiment because I started with California Ale yeast 001 from white labs and added American Ale yeast 1056 from WYeast. I'm thinking I'll need to harvest this yeast and keep my new hybrid strain around for future brewing.

Sláinte!

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