Yeast Lag Time December 15 2014, 0 Comments

Ever notice how your yeast sometimes take a day or two to start fermentation? It can be concerning, for sure, and you might think that you got a bum yeast packet. But what might actually be going on inside your fermentor is the preliminary step of fermentation, a growth phase for the yeast. During this stage, the yeast cells are splitting, increasing vastly in number, getting ready to eat all those sugars in the wort. Once the yeast has grown up its colony, then begins that active fermentation that creates CO2 (we see in our fermentation lock) and krausen (the foamy head on the fermenting beer), two of the most visible signs of fermentation.
So, next time your beer doesn't kickoff to a vigorous fermentation within a day of pitching your yeast, you may want to wait just a bit longer before pitching more yeast.