[THC] Too much yeast?

[Thomas Hess]

The "head" that your wife saw on the top is formed during normal fermentation.

You can't really add too much yeast. When you move your beer out of 
the fermenter you'll see that you have about a pound of yeast, that 
grew during fermentation. So the extra quarter ounce or so in your 
yeast packet couldn't make any difference.

Fermentation doesn't start the instant that yeast is added. Dried 
yeast cells must absorb water and "wake up". This takes several hours 
if you use dry yeast, and a few  more hours if you use a liquid 
culture. No time at all is needed if you make a "starter culture" 
that is visibly fermenting when you add yeast to your wort. The 
number of yeast cells increases rapidly during the first day or two 
of fermentation. As the number of yeast cells increases, so does the 
rate of fermentation, until the amount of  fermentable sugars gets low.

When you wrote, "sealed it in the fermenter", do you mean that you 
put an airlock on top? If you really seal it, so that carbon dioxide 
produced by fermentation can't escape, the fermentation container can blow up.

Your beer will be fine.

Tom

At 08:22 AM 7/21/2008, you wrote:
>Have a question...my fermentation took place nearly 5-6 days after I
>had sealed it in the fermenter and I didn't think it would start
>because maybe I had added the yeast when it was too hot. So, I ordered
>more yeast. When we got the new yeast 6 days later I didn't even think
>to look to see if had begun fermenting because I just 'knew' it hadn't
>so I asked my wife to go ahead and take care of sprinkling the new
>yeast over the top and reseal the bucket. She comes back and tells me
>she did that and that it looked like it had a 'head' on it. I froze a
>bit wondering if we had just added too much yeast - two packets now.
>So, I'm asking if my batch is bad now because of that? IDK.
>
>Jeff
>
>
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