Is my Brew still good?

I received the Scottish 80 kit 2 weeks ago on a 106 degree day. The Yeast package seemed warm. I quickly put it in the refrigerator. Last Sunday I brewed. The liquid yeast was activated by slapping the package and a small pin hole developed in the package so it didn’t inflate. The inner package did break so it was mixed… I went ahead and used the yeast.

Tuesday (2 days later) no fermentation activity so I ordered another beer kit with powered yeast. On Saturday I noticed the last Sunday’s batch had a 1 inch foam cap and was bubbling wildly.

Question: Is this still a good batch or should I dump it?

Thoughts?

joneshg

This is a good example of needing to make a starter. Because of the pin hole you had no idea if the yeast was viable. The starter would have shown that and built up the yeast population from those that died off due to the heat.

With good sanitation, you are probably ok. The only way to tell will be to smell and drink some of the brew when it is done.

Give it time.

With your next order, get a couple extra pounds of DME to make starters with.

I agree on the benefit of making a starter in this case. Due to high outside temperatures, I have had problems recently with liquid yeast shipped to me. Making starters alerted me to this problem before I pitched the yeast.

In addition to ordering DME to make starters you might want to order a couple packets of dry yeast to keep on hand for a backup in case you run into problems making a starter. Safale US-05 and S-04 are great choices. Those packets will keep for quite some time (several months easily) if kept cool in your fridge.

Whatever you do never ever, ever dump a beer before it’s fermented and you’ve tried it out. Sometimes you’ll be surprised.

That said, your probably good to go. If it took a while for the yeast to activate you probably underpitched or the yeast wasn’t very good to begin with so it had a longer lag time with more reproduction which could lead to more of the yeasty characteristics. Chances are you’re perfectly fine.

So, like others have said: keep dry yeast on hand in the fridge just in case or look into buying a starter kit which I think should be everyone’s second purchase once they get into homebrewing.