so i got a vial of white labs liquid yeast and it sat out overnight and i just threw it back in the fridge. will the yeast still be viable?
It should be fine. It never got above room temp, did it? Just make a starter if your gravity is going to be over 1.040 or so.
+1 to Homebrew42. I mail order all of my liquid yeast and even with an icepack, it is well above fridge temps by the time it gets to me. never a prob to date.
I'll third what HB42 and Haddon said. I've even had a vial sit in the post office for two weeks and by making a good starter and stepping it up, no issues at all.
About the only thing I can say for sure about this vial is that there will be less viable cells then if it hadn't sat out. But if you follow the starter recommendations of a calculator (such as Mr. Malty), it will be fine. It assumes less than ideal storage.
hey guys thanks for the advice, one problem though, i brewed yesterday and pitched my yeast and i still havent seen any activity so that leads me to believe that the yeast was damaged during that time out of the fridge..any thoughts?
Did you make a yeast starter? If so, how ‘healthy’ was your starter: noticeable krausen, noticeable yeast in the bottom of the flask/jar?
What Jack said. Depending on the gravity of your wort, you may have seriously underpitched, even if your yeast was fine. It's not unusual when pitching a vial straight into a wort of 1.050 or more to see 24-36 hour lag times. Again, it's really unlikely that sitting out overnight harmed your yeast. It gets shipped across country to folks all the time, often without any refrigeration, and works fine. RDWHAHB and all that.
