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yeast

captjpr3

Brewer
Joined
Aug 8, 2014
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Location
Nap, CA
I have a batch of stout I made yesterday in the fermenter whose behavior is befuddling me. It went immediately into an uncontrolled frenzy of fermentation with foam & beer spewing out the top. Now, 24 hours after pitching the yeast into 75 degree wort, It seems to be all but finished fermenting with no activity in the fermentation lock. This morning I had to take the carboy out of my fermentation fridge, which has been kept at an un varying 65 degrees, and clean off the carboy and change out the lock. fortunately I caught it before it made a real mess and was able to slide a baking sheet under the carboy to catch all the spill over. There was wort sprayed all over the top of the inside of my fridge and on the walls. The yeast is Wyeast Irish Ale which I harvested when I bottled a batch of Irish Red Ale the day before. The yeast behaved normally in that batch and was very dormant when I harvested it. I kept it in the fridge(33 degrees) overnight and reactivated it with a small amount of reserved wort from a previous batch, which I boiled for 5 minutes and cooled to 70 degrees before putting the yeast in. OG was 1.056 and I haven't taken another reading as I want to have an idea of what I should be looking for. I've had this happen a couple times in the distant past and the beer always turns out drinkable, though maybe not what I had been hoping for, with some off flavors. I always chalked it up to some wild strain taking hold. Now though, I am much more fastidious about sanitation than in my early days and I know I pitched a large amount of very active yeast.
Does anybody have any ideas as to what I'm looking at?   
 
Did you put your new beer right on top of your yeast cake?  If so, you were vastly over pitching.  You had hungry yeast and lots of it, is what it sounds like to me.
 
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