A comedy of yeasty errors

[chewyheel]

I just brewed up a 5 gallon ESB yesterday, which I had bought the yeast for a couple months ago but didn’t have time to brew immediately. The born on date for the pack of WLP 002 was June 10 with a best by date of December 10. Since the yeast was pretty old, I went to a local bottle shop that sells some home brew stuff as well to look for fresher yeast.

There is only 1 pack of English ale yeast at the shop, a Wyeast 1968 with what I read as a born on date of August 3, 2018

I get home and am preparing a starter using the “shaken not stirred” method when I realize the date on the Wyeast is actually August 3, 2016!

So I go ahead and use the old White Labs for the starter, but then I forget to aerate the wort after pitching.

It’s a day later when I realize I didn’t aerate, so I just gave it a good shake for a few minutes since there had been no sign of fermentation.

Does this wort have any chance at fermenting now?

Also, carefully read the dates on your yeast packages[emoji19]

 

[S-Met]

RDWHAHB!

There's a statistic somewhere here in HBt that yeast loses x% viability per year provided it is kept in controlled environment. I don't recall the number, but I think it's in the 5-10% range per year. Assuming storage conditions are less than favorable and you lost 25% per year, you are still at 1/2 a pack after the two years. A good starter will get your cell-count up quick.

 

[Vale71]

5-10% is extremely unrealistic for liquid (i.e. live) yeast. It's more like 90-95% per year if properly refrigerated.
It's hard to tell the OP what will happen next without knowing if the starter had actually shown any sign of activity. Not aerating the wort will however definitely cause some issues, even if the yeast was still viable.

 

[chewyheel]

5-10% is extremely unrealistic for liquid (i.e. live) yeast. It's more like 90-95% per year if properly refrigerated.
It's hard to tell the OP what will happen next without knowing if the starter had actually shown any sign of activity. Not aerating the wort will however definitely cause some issues, even if the yeast was still viable.

The starter showed some activity, but not what I’m accustomed to. However there is good news, at last check a good looking krausen was starting to form, so hopefully I’m good to go.