Comment on I made a killer wort :(
tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz 1 day agoYeah, 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
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
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.
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 21 hours ago
Misread proportion, it’s 1dl/1.5l for starter, quite small sugar content indeed, should be fine even if it was somewhat spoiled