Glossary
Pitching
Adding yeast to cooled wort, and by extension the quantity of yeast added relative to wort volume and gravity.
Also called pitch, pitching rate, yeast pitch.
The full record
Pitching has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Pitching — Add yeast to cooled, oxygenated wort at a rate matched to the volume, gravity and fermentation temperature.
Pitching rate is one of the most consequential and least visible variables in brewing. Too little yeast means a long lag, more stress compounds, higher esters and often incomplete attenuation; far too much produces a thin, characterless beer that finished before it developed anything.
Lagers are conventionally pitched at roughly twice the rate of ales, because cold fermentation gives the yeast less opportunity to multiply.
Related
- Lag phase — The period before visible fermentation.
- Ester — What under-pitching tends to increase.
- Fermentation — What pitching starts.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.