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I'm a noob brewer and being distracted added boiling water to my yeast. I added cold water immediately however I'm afraid I may have committed yeastocide. The only place I could think of around me with yeast was Wilko however they had ran out of ale/beer yeast and only had Gervin Universal Wine Yeast and GV13 cider yeast. I have ordered ale yeast online, however I'm afraid it will not arrive until at least tomorrow and I made my wort yesterday. Question: 1. should I wait for the ale yeast (would my wort go off)? 2. should I use the wine yeast? 3. should I use the cider yeast?

Thank you in advance.

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  • The answers below are good. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I tend to be wreckless and experimental, but adding wine yeast will give you a stupid strong beer with an unusual taste. It might be fun and you won’t have to worry about infection. Of course, if you only have to wait a day you will probably be fine.
    – mreff555
    Commented Aug 24, 2018 at 0:31

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Its pretty safe to say that the yeast is dead. If you can keep the wort sealed and cool at room temperature you should be fine waiting for the ale yeast. However adding the wine or cider yeast may give you some interesting and probably fun flavors.
If you are worried about and spoilage in your wort by the time the yeast arrives you can re-steriize it in a sense. Just put it back into the kettle and boil for about 20 minutes. This will "cleanse" your wort without overly affecting your starting gravity and bitterness. After its cooled then you can add your yeast. It's a good practice to add your yeast after the wort is in the fermenter. That way you can avoid this issue in the future. Probably a mistake that will only be made once however.

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Personally I'd wait for the ale yeast. Assuming your fermenter is well sanitised then on the one hand there's a small risk of bacterial or wild yeast infection, giving you a bad result. On the other hand you have two alternatives which will definitely give you a result other than that which you were aiming for.

Has the wort spent much time exposed to air? Is there much air space in your fermenter? Any way you can chill it until the yeast arrives? If it's a high IBU that might mitigate the risk even further.

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I bite the bullet and throw in some wine yeast in there. It has started fermenting. My next question is, as wine yeast does not break down maltotriose, would adding ale yeast continue the fermentation or would the wine yeast compete and kill the ale yeast?

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