Maybe not, but I think it should be constantly increasing as gravity increases. 3 fixed pitching rates seems like an oversimplification.
I do know that pitching a single pack of yeast in 1.060 wort gives me results that I don’t like for most styles, which makes me think that this is all about marketing a product to the widest audience possible. The yeast companies know that people who care about exact pitching rates will make a starter regardless of what they say.
I agree, and fwiw I use Mr Malty all the time. I just wonder if a pitching rate curve that looked more like f(x) = x^3 would be more appropriate. That’s just my gut feeling, with no facts to back that up.
What throw a lot of people off about mrmalty is the volumes he uses: for a lager you need a 3 gallon starter for instance. Who wants to pitch a 3 gallon starter into 5 gallons of beer? I know that I’m going to pour the liquid off and just use the slurry but that’s what initially turned me away from using hi calculators.
You don’t need a 3 gallon starter for 5 gallons of beer.
Yeah I don’t know of any calculator that does stepped starters well, which is really what you’d want to do if making a very large starter. I do those calculations by hand. Sean Terrill has a workaround using the mrrmalty rates on his website.
Well, that is oversimplified at best. A 2 qt starter is recommended for a regular strength ale and 4 qt for a lager. Twice that for a 1.080 beer. And more the higher you go. And that’s with fresh yeast. I always pitch a “5 gallon starter” for my >1.100 beers and I am happy with the results. YMMV.
Here’s a “must read” article on yeast pitching: http://www.byo.com/component/resource/article/1749-yeast-pitching-rates-advance-homebrewing
Excellent article…
Back to the price. My expert recoments to pitch 1 liter per one BBL of 1050 lager.
This translates to 5 liters of slurry that I need to buy. With shipping it is almost $500.
So if you do a little math you can find out that is expert recommendation for 5 gal or 10 gal batches.
according to that pitching rate you need 156.25 ml for a 5 gallon batch of 1.050 lager. That’s not a lot more than 2 smack packs or vials if you call the vial approx .5 actual yeast. If that measure is for the whole volume than that means a little over one pack or vial to 5 gallons. interesting! unless it’s not a linear relationship.
I don’t know where you’re getting the yeast, but BSI was charging me a little more than half that. It might be worth giving them a call.
I suspect (without any evidence) that since White Labs and Wyeast are competing against one another in a high-volume, low-margin market, they’re each wary of increasing prices and losing business to the other.
Note that when Wyeast came out with the Activator packs, White Labs increased the cell counts in the vials (and the price, IIRC) almost immediately.
That makes sense.
Mr. Malty estimates that a medium density slurry of this size would be close to 400 billion cells, which seems like a more appropriate lager pitching rate for 5 gallons. Given that a White Labs vial is 35 ml, this seems about right.
Why did I think that a vial was 125 ml?
The Wyeast activator packs are 125 mL.
ahh gotcha. but that is pretty thin slurry so I guess my calculations above are full of s***t. more like 4 vials or packs to 5 gallons. which is pretty close to what mr malty would indicate.
I was discussing pitching rates and their website’s pitching calculator with a Wyeast rep once and they straight up said to use Mr Malty instead for best results.
That is too funny.
Yeah, that’s kinda weird. Why would they even have the pitching rate calculator on their site in that case…
well, they do also have ‘pitchable’ on their packaging 
;D