When it comes to ale yeasts, most brewers will not look past the Safale US-05 yeast. As popular as it is, it is still relatively misunderstood in how it works and what the best practice is.
I have been using the US-05 yeast for a long time now as I primarily brew IPA style beers. I always rehydrate my yeast in 110ml of water, the ratio is 10 times the weight of the packet contents in water.
The yeast comes in 11.5g packets, so 110ml is the sweet spot to wake it up and get it hungry for some wort. I let it sit covered in a cup of warm water for 15-20 minutes and then pour it into my wort. Sprinkle it into the cup, don’t stir.
You might have heard rehydrating your dry yeast means you should see action in 12 hours. In my experience, this is not always the case. A lot of the time it takes my brews upwards of 24+ hours to even start doing anything. Maybe it is the warmer climate here, but I rarely see yeast doing its thing so quickyl.
Just like you Google when you are sick and convince yourself you are dying, you probably do the same with your brew. Searching for terms like, “beer not fermenting 12 hours” and work yourself into worried state that you killed your yeast, your brew is infected, your wort was too warm or that you need to pitch more yeast again.
If your wort temperature was decent, if you used sterilised equipment: your yeast is fine and in my experience with the US-05, it is quite common to not see any action in the fermenting vessel at all.
You should see some form of bubbling like you would in a glass of Coke and hopefully little bubbles on-top of the wort, but if you don’t see a big wad of foam, you should not stress.
In most of the beers I have made, I see very little krausen. I am lucky if I even get a 1/4 inch of krausen in my vessel. I have read some people see so much fermenting action that it blows their air locks and all kinds of other things. It all depends on whether you rehydrate or use a yeast starter. There are many factors.
One 11.5g packet of US-05 yeast is not going to give you that kind of reaction in an APA/IPA style beer. In darker and heavier styles of beer, you will definitely see a bit of action though.
As long as you have krausen, even if it is only small, then you are fine. It could just be your brew is a little warmer than it should be or the style of beer you are brewing combined with your choice of fermentables means there is nothing really for the yeast to go psycho on.
Relax, have a homebrew. Bottle and taste it. If it does not work, try again. You really have to mess things up for your yeast to not do their job. Even too hot of a wort will still produce beer, it’ll just taste and smell like bananas.
