Wyeast issue, cause for concern?

[MAN99]

I just got done brewing an IPA, it's only my second batch and my first time using wyeast. Everything was all good until I went to top off my fermenter with water to get it to 5 gal. I use bottled spring water and should have bought 6 gal but only had 5, after boil evaporation I was more than half a gal short and had to fill the rest with water from my SLOW fridge filtered water because I don't trust regular tap water. My concern there is leaving the wort uncovered for an extra 7-8 minutes while I filled water from the fridge...I know your supposed to get that lid on asap to avoid contamination, is this an issue?

My second problem occurred right after when I went to pitch the wyeast, the nutrient packet did not open after I smacked it hours earlier... I looked into the packet and saw it was full so I smacked it much harder than I had anticipated you had to and it opened this time. I re-sanitized the bag up to the opening and pitched the rest before capping the fermenter...

Now im just worried the wort was sitting uncovered too long and that the yeast wasn't properly pitched. Should this be cause for concern or am I being too paranoid lol? Any info helps, thanks guys!

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[chickypad]

I would RDWHAHB, you are very likely totally fine especially if you didn't have any fruit flies buzzing around or a pit-bull mix walking by and lapping at the wort in the bucket while you weren't paying attention (this can happen, don't ask me how I know ). You may want to consider looking into yeast starters in the future for bigger beers but it's not going to ruin anything. I go about 50/50 on getting the damn nutrient packs broken, I don't worry about it.

 

[thrashandburn]

it should be fine. yeah, you don't want to leave the stuff uncovered for extreme lengths, but once your yeast takes off it will out compete most contaminants. this is why you should take as much precaution as possible to shorten the lag time as much as possible. the sooner your yeast takes off, the less of a chance contaminants have to take hold of your beer.

in regards to the smack pack nutrient pack, that's really no problem either. the nutrient pack pulls the yeast out of dormancy, it wakes them up and gets them ready to chomp down the sugars in your wort. Not smacking it will really just result in a longer lag time as the yeast will have to wake themselves up after pitching instead of before. not a big deal.

for your next batch I would recommend a yeast starter to cut down your lag time and ensure a proper pitching rate. while smack packs contain enough yeast to ferment a 5 gallon batch, more yeast is often needed to have a proper pitching rate and it will improve your beer's flavor and quality of fermentation. also try to aerate your wort very well. if you do this and maintain good sanitation practices, contamination will be highly unlikely and a rare occurrence.

 

[MAN99]

Ok I can rest a bit easier now, thank you for the thought out replys!

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