Just read in “Brewing Classic Styles” by Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer page 285, bottom of page, NOT to make a yeast starter from dry yeast. Claim it is much cheaper to buy more yeast and hydrate. Surely not everyone who makes a yeast starter uses White Labs or Wyeast.
As for cost, Wyeast would have cost me $20 from Northern Brewer, $6 for yeast and $14 shipping.
Can anyone think of a reason NOT to make a starter from dry yeast? The goal is to increase cell count. How does liquid yeast work well for starters but it is better just to pitch re-hydrated dry yeast?
Will send the authors an email and see what John Palmer has to say in his book, “How to Brew.”
The reason dry yeast starters are not recommended is that part of the process of creating dry yeast involves maximizing the yeast’s internal nutrients and such at the moment before drying. Making a starter with dry yeast actually uses up those nutrients and such.
That’s not the case with wet yeast and, since wet yeast cell counts are about half of dry, starters are pretty much always recommended.
i have made starters before. i use only part of the pack and make a starter. in addition i have used a full pack of yeast and then brewed on top of that cake a few times before getting rid of it. both work just fine
If you have extra wort laying around from a previous batch, then making a starter isn’t such a bad thing to do if you really want to. But if you don’t have spare wort, then keep in mind that you are blowing extra money on extract to make the yeast starter. Dry yeast is all about high quality, less fuss and less money. If you’re going to mess around making a yeast starter, well, you’re wasting your time AND money IMHO.
Only time I have found it useful to make a starter with dry yeast is stuck fermentation for a big beer.
Best to pitch really active yeast starter to kick start fermentation again.
Sprinkling dry yeast on stuck fermentation has never worker for me.
Making a starter with dry yeast compromises yeast health and viability as hokerer alludes to. Repitching slurring from formerly dry yeast or making a starter from that would be proper.
yeast doesn’t do so well when rehydrated with alcohol.
hookerer brought up important points about dry yeast and their internal reserves.
Compared to liquid yeast it is not so mych a matter of cell count but what we generally call “yeast health”. For liquid yeast a starter is not only recommended for increasing the cell count but also for replenishing reserves that the yeast was living on while sitting in the fridge. If those reserves are replenished, and not spent again b/c the starter was sitting in the fridge for a week, then the lag phase will be shorter and the yeast will perform better in your beer.
Theoretically, it is a bad idea since dry yeast already have their glycol reserves stored and in suspension and making a starter could cause them to blow their reserves. The idea of making a starter is to grow up enough cells. With dry yeast you can be fairly certain on the # of viable cells in the packet so a starter is not needed and could be detrimental if the starter is too small.
Thank you all very much. I use dry yeast as no LHBS carries liquid and it is too expensive to order on-line. Had I not read “Brewing Classic Styles” and posted the dry yeast question, brew day would have involved destroying dry yeast on an expensive stirrer in an expensive flask.
Maybe the monitors can create a sticky not to make yeast starters from dry yeast.
You wouldn’t be destroying it, exactly. You would probably be pitching a sub-optimal starter and going through unnecessary trouble.
On the positive side, you can use that stir plate and flask to make starters from stored slurry after you harvest it from your fermenter. Or grow up some yeast from a commercial bottle, which can be fun.
If you read the instructions for US-05 it says plain as day, “Sprinkle into wort”. And I swear Nottingham use to say, “Do not aerate”. But it also talks about Lysine so, you know, You didn’t say the magic word!
Yes, Fermentis has instructions for both. I’m pretty sure “Sprinkle onto wort” is the sales line to encourage purchase. And it does work pretty well, but if you want maximum viability (like for a big beer) you really should rehydrate.
No, but from what I hear (I haven’t asked the yeast personally) is that their cell walls are inactive and some will die from the rush of sugars entering their cells. Once rehydrated in water they can fight the osmotic pressure.
I didn’t see anyone bring up the main issue (in my opinion). Which is if you make starter with dry yeast, you’ll kill about 50-60% of them right off the bat. It is better to rehydrate dry yeast in warm water (35-40C - 95-104F) for 15-20 min and then gradually cool and add to wort or starter. This has to do with the fact that dried cells have damaged membranes and need time to rebuild them, “patch the holes”, resume membrane transport control, etc. Otherwise they have no control as to what goes in or out of cells. That happens fairly quickly, but still takes a few minutes. Temperature also plays a role. Rehydrating in cool water ~60*F will usually kill about a half of them. Now if you put dry yeast into a starter, the relatively high sugar concentration (yes, even 1.030 is high relative to dry yeast) and hops (if any) will destroy a lot of cells so essentially you’ll be raising the starter to get back up to the number of cells that was there to begin with.
Another thing is that dry yeast packets contain approx 200 billion cells, and if you put directly into wort and kill half of them in doing so, there will still be enough cells left to normally ferment your average beer.
I think Kai was responding to the person saying that trying to pitch on a stuck fermentation never worked for him/her. Actually, I don’t think it, I know. Since he quoted him and all.
