StillDragon® Community Forum

Welcome!

Be part of our community & join our international next generation forum now!

In this Discussion

I dont think my yeast is having enough babies

2»

Comments

  • So. Umm... I have a confession.

    Because I can’t get tomato paste in my sleepy little jungle town I’ve been using tomato purée (tomato sauce for Americans). For some reason it didn’t occur to me that tomato paste just has almost twice the tomato goodness of purée.

    I think what was happening as nutrition starvation. Plain and simple.

    Today I put down 3 tpw in 200l fermenters testing some new yeasts and ACTUAL tomato paste. We’ll see how it goes over the next week.

    I feel like such a moron.

    Oh well. At least I had the opportunity to really look at the details of a ferment and recognize problems when they arise. So in the end it was really good training on ferment issues.

  • Just out of curiousity do you have to adjust your PH for whole grain, on grain washes to get it down to 4.5 ?? I used to do that but I havent lately and I have noticed my yeilds are a bit lower ??

  • I am using EC1118 as my yeast as well. I am lucky to nudge 3 % of my washes, which is OK as I am just testing recipes but I want to get it better.

  • I’m only doing raw sugar washes right now. Yes I have to bump ph up almost every time. As of the latest batches progress today it looks like they may still be a bit deficient in nutrients of some sort. I’m adding b vitamins to see if that helps.

    I’m also trying some lalvin HT and SR yeast on these five ferments. Thus far the SR seems to be liking the environment a smidgen better but they are proceeding at about the same rate. The SR has a proper cap where the HT has almost none.

  • WellI just solved my own question. i just added a bit of citiric acid to take the PH down to 4.5 and all 4 ferments are going nuts now. yeyy

  • @donmateo sorry being a bit stupid ... what was your PH prior to adjustment

  • a 'shock' drop of 0.5 pH with citric worked for us, I guess it also slowed any potential lacto growth, which kept pH from dropping way down to 3.0

  • @richard. It was about 6. So still fermenting but not as good. So I added about .75 grams of citric and it dropped it down to 4.5. Now they are bubbling at twice the speed. Boy do I feel like a dolt.

  • edited April 2019

    The pH scale is logarithmic (it represents the negative log of the hydrogen ion concentration in the solution).

    What this means is a pH6 is 10x more acidic than pH7
    pH5 is 10x more acidic than pH6 (100x more than pH7)
    pH4 is 10x more acidic than pH5 (100x more acidic than pH6, 1000x more acidic than pH7)
    etc.

    Therefore the amount of acid needed to lower your pH increases as the pH of your wash decreases.

    The same thing applies when adding base to your wash to raise your wash's pH
    To raise your pH from pH3 to pH4 requires 10x more base than raising the pH from pH4 to pH5 (etc.)

    I'm more like I am now than I was before.

Sign In or Register to comment.