Like the question says, the pack arrived pre-smacked! I'm making a yeast starter before I brew so that'll tell me whether the yeast is ok, but what I need to know is whether to keep it in the fridge when it's in this state. (A great answer will give me insight into why I should or shouldn't.)
I ordered four extracts from NB and received four Wyeast liquid yeast smack packs. There website specifically recommended against purchasing liquid yeast from them during the summer but I did so anyways. The yeast/package was shipped on Monday and arrived Friday night, where I immediate smacked two of the packets and put the other two in the fridgerator. The two I smacked that night inflated as normal and I made yeast starters out of them, which I just pitched yesterday. …
Is making a starter a good idea when using a larger activator pack from Wyeast? Should you smack the packet and add it to the starter, or add it after it swells?
I have noticed that the smackpacks say on the package that the package is meant for a 5 gal. batch and that you should pour the pack directly into the wort. On the otherhand - nearly everyone tells me to always make a starter. Is this just because making a starter never hurts or does the package contain wrong instructions? I would have guessed that the yeast producers would tell you on the package if you should need some extra …
I'm brewing on Sunday (today is Friday), and I neglected to get my yeast (WY1056) until just this afternoon. I could make a starter, but I don't know if it would reach "high krausen" in time for pitching Sunday night. And I certainly wouldn't be able to cold crash it, as I normally do. Or, I could just pitch the smack pack, which has a manufacture date of 13-Feb-2012. Beer Smith tells me that the yeast is 84% viable, yielding …
So I completed my first batch of homebrew this morning, but I forgot one potentially (okay, not potentially, definitely) important aspect of the whole process: the yeast. I didn't forget it, per se, but I forgot that I was supposed to smack the smack pack three hours in advance (per the instructions on the Wyeast Activator package, it says three hours in advance or pitch immediately). Being a beer wunderkind, I split the difference and smacked it 90 minutes before …
So I have my first possible stuck fermentation. First, my recipe: http://hopville.com/recipe/166971/extra-special-strong-bitter-english-pale-ale-recipes/shoals-pale-ale-clone I pitched with two Wyeast packs of London ESB Ale as recommended by the LBS due to starting gravity. When I finished brewing, I realized that a hydrometer I had bought turned out to be a floating thermometer, so I could not take a first reading. I let it go as normal. Activity was normal for the first few days but never got really bubbling. I chalked this …