Beer Forum

Hey all,

Made a 5L starter Thursday morning, used my new lab stirplate. Well, that evening when I was checking on it, the bottom of my flask was warm and I checked the temp of the starter: 90*. Yikes. Turns out the stirplate was hot (no heater element, just friction I guess).

I changed stirplates and by Friday the yeast had cooled to room temp and propagated up and by Saturday I had a good 1/2" of yeast in the bottom of the flask.

Oh, this is Wyeast 1968 btw (like WLP002).

I went to pitch it Sat evening and after decanting all but the last 7-800 mL, I smelled the started and it was clove/belgian smelling. Like a Hefeweizen aroma.

I pitched it anyway into 21 gallons of 1060 wort at 68*.

The million dollar question: Should I have pitched?

Honestly I wouldnt worry about it too much. Yeast like to grow at warmer temps anyways. sure they are gonna throw a lot of esters while doing that, but as long as you decanted your nasty propigation wort, you should be fine.

Same thing happened to me on my last starter. I wasn't too worried about it, I did move it to a cooler spot though. My understanding is that there aren't any negative affects on ale yeast until over 90F.

If the starter is too hot and unwanted flavors/aromas are coming from the starter, you can refrigerate the starter to flocculate the yeast. Then decant off the clear starter wort, and just pitch a concentrated yeast slurry. It sounds like you had good yeast growth going, I'd just be worried about the funky flavors of the starter wort. At this point, I wouldn't worry about it and I'd try to convince myself that the starter wort isn't going to effect the flavors of a 21g batch anyway.