Can out of date yeast, campden tablets , yeast nutrient etc still be used?

[mancer62]

while clearing out a few things I have just come across a few items and out of Curiosity I was wondering if they could still be used. It would be no big deal if they can't but if they can then i'd keep them. I have an unopened sachet of wilko wine yeast and two unopened little plastic containers of wilko campden tablets and yeast nutrient.

 

[Drunkula]

Yeast nutrient essentially immortal. Campden tablets do degrade but it's pretty slow - how old are you talking? If you get your nose up to the pot do you still recoil and cough, and could they revivify a swooned duchess? If so they're fine.

Yeast.... pffft, that's going to be the tricky one. I've had packets of dried wine yeast that were utterly dead 2 years out of date. They were the huge ones with mad amounts of nutrient and just stored in a room. I'm using dried packets of s-33 kept in a freezer that went out of date in 2016 and they're still chirpy as can be.

 

[mancer62]

Oct and Dec 2015!!!!! LOL.......I can defo smell the yeast nutrient but wasnt sure if that was a good or a bad thing......so chuck or keep???

 

[Drunkula]

.I can defo smell the yeast nutrient but wasnt sure if that was a good or a bad thing......so chuck or keep???

I love the smell of yeast nutrient, definitely keep it and class is as 100% effective.

I was using campden tablets I got from at batch of stuff from a car boot sale and the campden tablets expired in 2006, I tested them against a batch of new ones and the new ones would make you recoil from sniffing them after about a 10th of a second and you'd cough for 15 minutes. The old ones would take maybe 1.5 seconds for the same effect. But if you bite into them they're fairly similar - so 2015 I'd treat as at least 75% effective.

 

[marshbrewer]

As an experiment, you could always try making a starter with the yeast.