Was in a hurry and made a mistake yesterday - I accidentally transferred my wort into my fermenter at 104 degrees. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t bother chilling it further, I just sealed the lid and went to bed. When I woke up, it was still 80 degrees, so I went out and came home to aerate the wort and pitch the yeast when it had dropped to 72 (Wyeast Forbidden Fruit). I have never waited so long to pitch my yeast… is there anything I should expect to come from this?
As long as everything is sanitary it’ll be just fine. After a long brew day, I sometimes wait until the morning to pitch when I’ve reached optimum fermentation temps. RDWHAHB!
-J.K.L>
Beer. ;D
I experimented with this a few years ago. What happened was I left nearly 20 gallons of boiled 1.050 sugar water to cool in the garage- lid on in the kettle. I checked it every day and the solution started to show slight signs of something taking hold in there on day five IIRC. My daily opening of the lid probably contributed to this.
Don’t sweat the next day pitch. What’s more important that you waited to pitch your yeast at an appropriate temp.
The quicker the wort is chilled and the yeast is pitched the better. Sanitary conditions are optimal.
However, even if a very small amount of bacteria started to form in the wort at the warmer temps, it will likely be outplayed by a healthy fermentation as it will be far outnumbered by the yeast which will consume all of the nutrients and starve the bacteria ultimately either killing it or sending it into hibernation.
I’ve had to do this before. I used a pond pump to push ice cold water though my immersion chiller, but one of my pond pumps went out the day before brew day. I forgot about pump going out, and chilled wort in fridge till next day and pitched yeast. Beer turned out fine!
There could be HSA from transferring the wort into the fermenter at 104 degrees, but you won’t know until you taste it for sure.
Hot Side Aeration? From transferring wort at a warm temp?
I doubt that you’d get any flavors from that and I’m not sure that’s what you meant to say…
Woohoo! HSA debate! HSA debate! I’m going to go pop some popcorn. 
I abuse the hell out of my wort and I’ve never detected any HSA.
I think HSA is potentially an issue @ 145+ degrees.
And never had a problem with it. Not once. And I’ve splashed some hot wort around believe me…
From Palmer’s “How to Brew”:
"The yeast is the most significant factor in determining the quality of a fermentation. Oxygen can be the most significant factor in determining the quality of the yeast. Oxygen is both your friend and your enemy. It is important to understand when which is which.
You should not aerate when the wort is hot, or even warm. Aeration of hot wort will cause the oxygen to chemically bind to various wort compounds. Over time, these compounds will break down, freeing atomic oxygen back into the beer where it can oxidize the alcohols and hop compounds producing off-flavors and aromas like wet cardboard or sherry-like flavors. The generally accepted temperature cutoff for preventing hot wort oxidation is 80°F.
Oxidation of your wort can happen in several ways. The first is by splashing or aerating the wort while it is hot. Other beginning-brewing books advocate pouring the hot wort after the boil into cold water in the fermenter to cool it and add oxygen for the yeast. Unfortunately the wort may still be hot enough to oxidize when it picks up oxygen from the splashing. Pouring it down the side of the bucket to minimize splashing doesn’t really help either since this increases the surface area of the wort exposed to the air. Thus it is important to cool the wort rapidly to below 80°F to prevent oxidation, and then aerate it to provide the dissolved oxygen that the yeast need. Cooling rapidly between 90 and 140°F is important because this temperature region is ideal for bacterial growth to establish itself in the wort."
Maybe your beer isn’t around long enough to show the effect. 
Hmmmm… sounds like a good reason for a bunch of homebrewers to all transfer hot wort (below 140 degrees F) into another vessel and let cool naturally, pitching yeast at normal pitching temperatures and then report the outcome of their experiment. But you could just read about it on this and several other boards. Isn’t this another one of the Aussie ideas… like BIAB was?
According to the great Charlie Bamforth from UC Davis, the answer to the existence of HSA is “Who knows”. There are so many reactions that transpire during the brewing process like oxidized polyphenols and gelled protiens due to oxidation. Alot of these reactions can become undone through the process of brewing and fermentation. Charlie goes on to say thet it is very difficult to pin down HSA as a contributor to beer flavor instability. He also said there is alot of continuing research being done to better understand all of these reactions and how they affect flavor stability. In esssence, the jury is still out on this one.
Maybe detecting HSA flavor depends on how fast the batch is consumed? If you drink it fast enough, it doesn’t have time to develope the wet cardboard flavor perhaps?
To follow on to the Charlie talk, I believe he’s also stated that at this point in time, HSA is only really a problem once you’ve locked down absolutely everything about your process like a pro.
That’s what I’ve always thought. It seems to take a couple months for the oxidation to get bad enough that it really effects the beer.