BeerBorg

ScrewyBrewer wrote:I would think the beer will be fine, as long as you add a new pitch of yeast... I hope it turns out ok for you.

I'm curious why new yeast would be needed. Freezing doesn't kill yeast does it? Unless maybe it freezes to the point where cell walls burst.

I would think that depending on how much sugar is still left, the yeast might be in a weakened state where it would be harder to reach FG and, possibly cause off flavors if not enough yeast is present. In my case, I'm hoping most of the fermentation was over. 007 works pretty fast and I gave it a good douse of uber fresh liquid yeast.

I know you can freeze dry yeast in dry form and make it last longer, we do that with bread yeast often. I'd assume dry beer yeast is similar.

In liquid form I think you would need to gradually freeze it or mix it with something that would prevent rapid freezing too prevent cell damage. The good news is that alcohol would be one of those possible things to mix it with. So would hydroscopic sugars, which you also happen to have. Also glycerol would help, and yeast happens to make that during fermentation too.

So I actually think your probably ok actually, although pitching more yeast won't hurt anything, you may not need to at all.

I would crank it up to 68-70 and the yeast will come back to life if there is still fermentable sugars.

bpgreen wrote:

ScrewyBrewer wrote:I would think the beer will be fine, as long as you add a new pitch of yeast... I hope it turns out ok for you.

I'm curious why new yeast would be needed. Freezing doesn't kill yeast does it? Unless maybe it freezes to the point where cell walls burst.

I don't put much faith in yeast that has been 'stressed out', either by too high or too low a temperature. I don't equate the freeze drying process, used for processing dry yeast, to just freezing yeast. The idea of having exploded yeast innards in my beer is not appealing to me at all. No one wants to dump a batch of beer so repitching with fresh yeast, in my mind is the better option to try and save the batch. It may or may not taste bad when it's done but I wouldn't consider it to be my finest work either.

Just took a hydrometer reading to make sure it matched with my refractometer and I am at 1.013 so seeing that my OG was higher than expected, .001 difference in FG and I'm very happy. Seems I lucked out.
It's pretty bitter but there's still lots of hop matter in the mix so I'm sure after I dry hop, things should clear out nicely. It may not be my best beer but as of today, it seems it's not a dumper!

It's good to know that your beer has turned out well.

Well, I'm not ready to say it is or isn't good and plan to mega dry hop next week before cold crashing (again ) and kegging.

Keg this 'ice' beer today and as we all figured, things are just fine and the only thing I can say about this at kegging time is that for being a 6.5%, 1.013 FG beer, it's a bit drier than I'd expect. However, I did use 007 yeast which did give it a fruitier nose but it's not DRY, just drier than any other beer I've had end at 1.013. So, maybe the iceberg did make a subtle change to the beer but I'm very happy with this.