yeast nutrient in kits

[abeyptfc]

had bought some YN, for making wine but decided to try some in a john bull ipa and coopers real ale and both seem to have fermented out well in the first week. alot of my kits stick but this has fermented out no danger with 1-1 1/2 spoonfaes nutrient!

 

[Kyral210]

If you make proper beer then there is no need to use yeast nutrients at all. The problem comes when using sugar instead of malt (the stuff which actually turns into beer) since malt has lots of nutrients and sugar has pretty much none. What you said makes a lot of sense if you are making single can kits, but as soon as you stop using sugar and go onto all malt kits you wont need your nutrients any more.

 

[Merry]

After a chat with my LHBS I decided to give the yeast nutrient a go since none of the kits I'd done had fermented out properly. The two I have on the go at the moment have reached 1010 after 5 days (Woodforde's Wherry and Milestone Black Pearl), instead of the usual getting stuck at 1020(ish) even after 4 weeks. All the kits I have done have been two can kits so I can only assume that there must be a problem with either a large proportion of difficult to ferment sugars in the kits or some nutrients must be removed somehow during manufacture.

The LHBS suggested that these kits should really contain a sachet of nutrient given the number of them that get stuck.

 

[seanipops]

It's a fair point. When I used to brew kits I did have the odd problem. I feel it came down to the following.

1. The supplied yeast is only 6g, the bare minimum required to ferment a kit out.

2. Variation in temperature stresses the yeast.

3. Poor aeration technique deprives yeast of oxygen when starting.

Therefore my solutions were.

1. Use yeast vit in each brew or, better still, ditch kit yeast for an 11.5g sachet of S04 or similar.

2. Keep as constant a temp as possible; I achieved this by using a brewfridge but you could also use a brew belt and a timer set to come on for 15 minutes every hour.

3. Aerate the cr@p out of the wort with a hand blender.

Hope this helps
Sean.

 

[spudbasher]

The problem comes when using sugar

Even dextrose?

Cheers ,Spud.

 

[Aleman]

It's not sugar per se but a general lack of nutrients in the wort particularly Free Amino Nitrogen - FAN that is used for general cell metabolism. This is easily remedied by a tsp of yeast nutrient which is usually ammonium di phosphate. Brupaks claim all sorts of other compounds (like zinc) are added, but this is in reality just as a result of the manufacturing process not a specific addition . . .as the amount of Zinc required is in the order of micrograms . . . .and overdoing it is worse than not doing it at all. . . . Whitelabs do something called servomyces which is a true zinc supplement . . .consisting of dead dried yeast grown in a zinc rich medium.

Spud, Dextrose is merely glucose, and apart from carbohydrate for energy contains no additional nutrients for yeast.

In fact one of the uses for the kit yeast is to boil it up for 5-10 minutes in 100ml of water and add it tot eh FV . . .along with a decent yeast . . .it acts as a great yeast nutrient . . . Fullers throw a bucketful of yeast into the boil in their beers just for this purpose.

I mostly agree with Sean in that it is probably 1 and 2 that are the major causes of poor kit fermentations and 1 and 2 that are the effective solutions.

Oxygen is not really a problem when using dried yeast . . .especially if you are not harvesting it for reuse later