Made a 1.6L starter for a ten gallon batch next week of American Wheat using wlp American Hef strain. Seeing as it is not flocculant at all despite putting in fridge is it important to pitch the whole starter or is it still reasonable to crash cool and pour starter beer off the yeast cake, sacrificing the suspended yeast. Thoughts?
Just dump the whole thing in your wort. I don’t chill and decant unless my starter is 4L+.
I agree. It’s a small enough starter to just dump it in. Next time, with a smaller starter, try to get it going about 12-24 hours before brewing and pitch it at high krausen.
I’ve used WY3068 in all of my hefes and have never had a problem cold crashing my starters, they seem to flocculate fine with no loss of yeast but as mentioned if you used extra light/light DME you can certainly just pitch the whole thing as well