Good morning everyone! I’m brewing today and using a yeast starter for the first time. I started it on Friday afternoon with 1/2 C of golden light DME, 2 cups of water and a packet of Wyeast 1056. The pale ale I’m brewing today should come in at 1060. I realize now that I should have started this up on Thursday so I may be a day behind but the yeast seems to have grown a lot and most of it has flocculated and sitting on the bottom.
I’ve checked the boards, I’ve checked into youtube a couple of times to get a handle on this and it’s still not clear. How do I pitch from here? Do I swirl the whole starter up and pitch? Do drain off the wort and just pitch the slurry? Should I try stepping it up now so it builds a little more through out the rest of the day?
In the future, you may want to at least double the size of the starter you made, but that will depend on your OG. I prefer to decant almost all of the spent wort, leaving just enough to swirl up the slurry for pitching.
I’m gonna decant mine today as well. I started Wednesday with one pack of 1056, and have stepped up twice per the instructions in the new Yeast book. (10 gallons)
I also prefer to make really big starters and leave myself enough time to crash cool and decant most of the liquid before pitching, but in the case of the original post of this thread, I would swirl the starter and pitch the whole thing today. My reasoning is because there are a lot of healthy yeast still in suspension, so if you dump the liquid, you would dump them as well.
I also would pitch the entire starter in this case. I do decant larger starters or starters that have been stepped up twice, but this one is small and active, I’m sure you’ll have a good strong fermentation.
To get the right amount of yeast cells for your beer, this is a great tool to use, and I always do use it. It is from some random guy. ;D http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html
The starter worked out great! I have a very active airlock this morning and there is a ton of activity in the beer its self as well. I’ve seen the light!!! Starters are the way to go!!! Thanks for the tips and advice yesterday.
With that size starter, as stated before, you probably didn’t accomplish as much yeast growth as you intended. I forget the details, but I believe pitching one pack of yeast into a 2 liter starter will get you double the population, with the reproduction phase typically being finished by 12 hours, depending on how you aerated – continuously stirred on a stir plate gets you more cells than aerating the wort and letting it sit, with regular swirling in between.
What you did accomplish is waking up the yeast and getting them active and ready to go – as shown by your fermentation. They woke up, started eating an building their stores, and I’m sure a little procreation occured … then saw all that food available when you pitched them into the fermenter.
The rational behind pitching the whole starter – if the yeast hasn’t finished fermenting and dropped out, you’ve got active yeast in suspension and you would select for the early flocculators and a smaller quantity of yeast. The rationale behind letting the yeast drop out and decanting is that a) you don’t want to add a large quantity of wort that is different form your batch diluting or altering the flavor and b) if you are regularly aerating or oxygenating your starter, there may be off flavors in the starter that you are adding to your batch.