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Time is of the essence if your homebrew hasn’t started fermenting within 48 hours! If you don’t have backup yeast on hand to pitch into the fermenter, follow these handy steps to try to revive your beer.

1. Apply to several graduate schools
2. Review offers and attend the school that offers the best combination of research expertise and professional training opportunities
3. In your first year, join the community informatics group in your program
4. Purchase a Nalgene bottle at their fundraiser
5. Acquire a packet of dry beer brewing yeast—don’t worry about details like yeast type, age, or provenance
6. Boil your community informatics bottle for a couple of minutes, just long enough to convince yourself that there’s an outside chance it’s sterile after sitting in your cupboard for the last year and a half
   
7. Fill the bottle ¼ to ½ full with the boiled “sterile” water
8. Cool the just-boiled water and bottle as rapidly as you can in an ice bath until it hits 80 degrees or so
9. Pour the yeast packet in and wait 15 minutes
10. While waiting, boil a teaspoon or so of sugar on the stove in a little bit of water (I had light malt extract on hand, but you could probably use priming sugar or plain granulated sugar if you are in a tighter pinch than I)
11. Cool that mixture down to 80 degrees in the ice batch as quickly as possible
12. By now you’ll know if the dry yeast is viable—if you see some foaming in your CIC bottle, you should be good to go
13. Pour the sugar water mixture on top of the yeast, let sit for 30 minutes. I covered mine with aluminum foil and a rubber band in order to maintain my illusion of a sterile environment.
14. Finally, carefully pour your possibly sterile and definitely ghetto yeast concoction into the primary fermenter

With a little luck, fermentation should take off within a few hours, provided your fermenter is not too hot or cold. With a lot of luck, you might have kept everything sterile and your yeast might be close enough to the original strain to render your beer drinkable.

Check back in a month for the final results. Prost!

Related coverage:
Explosion at teh brewery! (3/29/2004)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Graduate School, Beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.