Primary size and fermentation

Guess no one does 10-gallon primaries? Anyway, it did finally start, and start with a vengeance. Sure made me nervous waiting 3 days for fermentation to start showing. Thought I was going to have to dump it and spend another 6-hour day picking grapes.

Quixote

Dump it? Unless it smells of vinegar and you hate vinegar I can't think of a reason to ever dump must.

I think what you saw was 'propagation delay' the yeast multiply at a rate based on many factors such as strain, temp, nutrient availability, oxygen, sugar. It would definitely take longer (all things being equal) for a 10 gallon batch to show visible signs of fermentation versus a 1 gallon batch. Pitching rate is rarely descussed here because most people on the group are making batches smaller than 6 gallons. That affects this too. A good rule of thumb is pitch 1 gram of dry yeast per gallon.

Joe

Thanks Joe. I had begun to wonder, but I was not seeing any telltale tiny bubbles or miniscule amount of foam, even when stirred. What I did for the second pitching of yeast, which in retrospect was probably unnecessary, was to create quite a large starter that had must added in several aliquots to acclimate the yeast. Still the behavior was certainly not what I was used to seeing and had me worried. About the dumping, I realize I had a few more days to try to get the must fermenting, but was beginning to wonder if something had happened to make it unamenable to fermentation. Thanks for the replies...

Quixote