First time home brewing from Intro thread..

Pitching around 82-84 is way too hot, I'm surprised you haven't seen any signs of fermentation.. Although sometimes it can take a good few days to really kick off. Maybe after 48 hours you should get worried. Give it a good swirl and see if it foams up.. that's usually a good indication that fermentation is beginning. What temp are you fermenting at now?

You likely don't need to filter it before putting it in the fermenter, I never do. As a side note, I almost never do an actual secondary, and many agree that it really isn't necessary, but to each their own.

Cheers, and welcome to the hobby.

 

The most common question of every new brewer is "x hours and no activity, what do I do?" Search the forum it's littered with this very same question. Before doing anything open the fermenter and confirm there is no activity. Unless you have a clear carboy then no need to open it. If that is the case wait a full 48 hours.

What's the current temp of the wort?

P.s. I never filter my beer transferring it into the fermenter, but I do leave some trub behind. Regardless doesn't effect the yeast fermenting. It may effect something else but not yeast activity.

 

So, I have a couple of questions that can really help me help you.
1) How did you aerate your wort?
2) How much yeast did you pitch?
3) Did you add any yeast nutrient?
4) What type of water did you use? Tap or distilled/reverse osmosis?

 

Made a starter and used the same yeast(wlp500) in my Belgium Quad. It should starting bubbling by day 2. I fermented at 65 for 3 weeks then added a little yeast for another week.

 

Ok, so I'm pretty certain I know what is happening.
1) You didn't aerate your wort nearly enough. Long story short, yeast cells need oxygen to keep their cell walls fluid enough to split and replicate. The higher the gravity the more stressfull the environment is, so the yeast needs more oxygen. There are plenty of things online that you should look up on this. I aerate by vigorously shaking the chilled wort in the sanitized carboy for five minutes. That being said, I'm a recently graduated collegiate rugby player, so 70lbs of sloshing wort isn't that bad. If that's too heavy for you or you're doing more high gravity stuff, i would recommend an oxygen diffusion system.
This will cause a longer than usual lag-phase where the yeast is doing stuff, but you can't tell yet. If there's nothing going on after 72 hours, I would say shake it until it's frothy and pitch another vial of yeast. This will make it stale faster, so after you bottle it maybe throw a party to drink it asap.

2) You didn't pitch nearly enough yeast. Higher gravity brews need a lot of yeast to work their magic. Look into pitch rates and starters for higher gravity brews.
This could also be another issue. Underpitching can cause a stalled fermention and long lag phase. Also, once it's done you might have excess esters (fruity flavor and aroma compounds) and fusel alcohols (that hot booze feeling). This might actually not be an issue since Belgian beer is very fruity. To fix this, refer to 1.

3) If you didn't add nutrient this could also be an issue. This could also cause a long lag phase because the cells don't have enough nitrogen to replicate their DNA, and they need some of the metals in there as catalysts. Many times the grain provides enough nutrients, but better safe than sorry in my opinion.
No fix for this, just remember next time.

4) Your water probably isn't the issue. This being said, this is going to be an expensive hobby if you're using Smart Water. I would recommend going to King Soopers (or wherever you get groceries in California), buy some 5gallon jugs of distilled water, and adjust your water to the mineral content that you want. So, look into adjusting minerals in water.

Overall, don't lose sleep over this. Yeah, you did some rookie mistakes, but I messed about every step up in my first beer. Sure it wasn't even close to being an oatmeal stout like I wanted, but it was damn tasty. So, along those lines, keep pretty details notes on what you did, temperatures, and observations on what and when beer is doing stuff in case you want to replicate this, or to reference what NOT to do.

Welcome to the best hobby in the world, and if you have questions this forum is a great place to look.

 

The yeast have to start showing up somewhere, and "6-7 quarter-sized islands of bubbles" is a start. Since you likely stressed you first yeast with the pitch temp being a bit high, and since you are purchasing more yeast today, if the top of your beer is not filled with bubbles when you look again, or you're still not seeing a good rate of bubbling in the air lock, I'd go ahead and pitch the new yeast. Your current ambient temp of 70 is just a smidgen high for the best temp for fermentation, so if you can get that fermentor down just a couple of degrees, that will be beneficial. If you don't have a way to lower the temp like moving it to the basement or creating a swamp cooler, sometimes just setting the fermentor onto the floor instead of a table in a room will drop that temp a couple of degrees (assuming it's on a table now).

There's not much else that you can do at this point except to wait it out and see what you get. But I think waiting for the results can still make an acceptable beer, so don't consider dumping it at this point.

 

You should leave the beer in the primary until active fermentation is finished. This can be figured out by taking hydrometer readings over the course of a few days.

Ideally, the beer should remain in primary even longer than this to allow the yeast to clean up any off flavors. My beers usually spend a minimum of two weeks in primary. Usually longer.

Why secondary? Its not needed for most styles and you run the risk of exposing your beer to oxygen.

If you really have the itch to brew another batch my advice would be to buy another primary.

 

If you are brewing 5-gallon batches, you just need to be sure that your primary is a 6.5 gallon size. Using a 5-gallon carboy as a primary for a 5-gallon batch does not give you enough headroom for the krausen.

This is very wise. That's why you don't want to get anxious and start taking too many samples for multiple gravity readings every time that you think fermentation might be done.

 

Dont fear the plastic bucket. Yes, to take a sample you have to open the bucket, but there is no need to constantly open the bucket. If you are patient and pitch plenty of healthy yeast, when you open that bucket up at the 2 or 3 week mark I can almost guarantee you will be done with fermentation.