White Labs PurePitch Cell Count Falsification

Ingredients
1

Greetings, brewers.

A recent discovery was made as I was pulling the QC report for a White Labs 40ml PurePitch. I believe the brewing community should be aware of this and make White Labs aware of their violation of trustworthiness within the homebrew community. I am not a litigious person, but this could potentially be problematic legally for White Labs since it appears to have been going on for at least this year.

I have usually pulled the QC reports on their yeast. Recently, I have noticed that their cell counts are now reporting 86 billion cells per ml. The exact verbiage in their QC reports is “made to contain 2.15 billion cells/ml.” They used to give the exact count by the way. Per 40ml purepitch, that is 86 billion cells. If you look at the package however, you will notice that it states “Made to contain over 100 billion cells.” I am attaching a picture for reference(hopefully it shows).

I reached out to White Labs asking them about the difference between what is printed on the packaging and what is showing up in the QC reports. If you do the math by the way, this is a 14% difference. The response I got was this:
“First I want to say thank you for drawing our attention to this, we have made some changes in our production this year and this packaging is not reflective of that. Our pitches currently are being propagated to contain 2.15 billion cells per ml as the quality control per lot number indicates. This is what you should expect going forward with our product. I have shared your concern with management and I was told it will be addressed. We have no intention of confusing or misstating what we are providing. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you again for your concern.”

So, why am I bringing this up? I think it is a huge concern when BeerSmith, for example, defaults to 100 billion cells. One can say check the QC reports for the exact amount, but then why state on the package what the quantity is? If you are calculating viability of yeast based on 100 billion cells versus 86 billion cells, think of the difference there and the problems it may lead to down the line.

At the very least, those who read this will hopefully be aware that White Labs is not being honest with their packaging. Cheers.

akCjbPW3Y9pzrKfKA (905 KB)

2

Or you can forget about cell counts and go for vitality.  It works for many of us.

3

Omega Yeast did a test and showed cell counts could vary drastically by strain, but the biomass at the end was similar.

Have you noticed a difference in the quality of your beer?

4

IDK. First post here and it’s this item?

5

You could do your own cell count if you are worried about it.  I’m not.

6

Hand grenades and nuclear bombs, right?  I go for healthy yeast and have been using dry yeast (and re-pitching it as liquid after the first pitch) an awful lot lately… and I don’t sweat a bit of a lag, if it happens.

As to the concern:  The packaging was probably acquired in bulk and they are using it up.  They will likely change at some point to reference the cells/ml approach.

7

First, you should throw BeerSmith away.  There are so many flaws in that piece of software that I do not have time to enumerate them all.  I hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science and engineering and have been a practicing computer scientist and engineer for four decades, so I know good software when I see it. Secondly, the difference between 86 and 100 billion cells is in the noise because yeast biomass grows exponentially at rate of 2^n, where the symbol “^” denotes raised to the power of, not linearly.  You should read my blog post entitled “Yeast Culture Are Like Nuclear Weapons” (Yeast Cultures are Like Nuclear Weapons | Experimental Brewing) before you sweat the difference between 86 and 100 billion cells because there really is no quantifiable difference in terms of lag time (my hobby has been brewing science for almost thirty years).

8

Hmm… instead of BeerSmith what software is recommended?

9

BeerCAD VR is the best:
https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=36691.msg460237#msg460237

10

An April Fool’s joke?

11

My suggestion is to skip brewing software until you know all of the aspects of brewing and know how to verify if the software your are using is presenting you with pie-in-the-sky results. BeerSmith’s “brew house efficiency” is a prime example of pie-in-the-sky results.  To add insult to injury, the way that BeerSmith calculate’s brew house efficiency takes a barely usable brewing metric and makes it even more unusable.  That calculation is a 100% Brad Smith creation because I have not seen it in practice anywhere else during the last three decades.

In my humble, the major problem with BeerSmith is that it makes tends to make smart people stupid.  It tries to inject a level of accuracy into the production of beer that is impossible to meet in a home brewery and does so in a flawed way.  I have already mentioned in other threads how the basic extraction efficiency calculation is a been counter’s metric and not a directly usable brewing metric because it is focused on waste, not brewing.  However, the basic extraction efficiency calculation is almost unusable in a home brewery because most home brewers do not have quality labs where they can determine the actual IOB hot water extract (HWE) or ASBC dry basis, fine grind (DBFG) maximum yields for any given bag of malt. The maximum yield from a pound of malt can change from year to year or even bag to bag. Here is a clue.  Efficiency should be a measure of how much the available extract one was able to separate from the grist. One’s efficiency should not go up or down when changing base malts. The only thing that should change efficiency is a change in process or equipment. Yet, we constantly read how a change in base malt increased or decreased a brewer’s efficiency.  What really is happening is that there is an error in the efficiency calculation due to the base malt in question’s maximum possible yield being wrong in the malt lookup table.  What really changed is one’s extraction rate and that is 100% based on the actual maximum yield possible with any given bag of base malt, which is not a value that remains static from growing season to growing season.  In the end, brewers are trying use to “efficiency” as indirect flawed measure of extraction rate.  After all, efficiency is extraction rate divided by quotient of the sum of the weighted maximum yields of the grist components divided by the grist weight.

Algorithm

weighted_maximum_yield = 0

for i = 1 to number_of_grist_components_in_the recipe do
  weighted_maximum_yield =  weighted_maximum_yield + (grist_componet.maximum_yield * grist_component*.weight)*
end
weighted_maximum_yield_in_PPG = weighted_maximum_yield / grist_weight
What the above algorithm does if calculate the weighted maximum yield in PPG for any given grist.  In the case, the grist recipe is contained in a array of structures that contain each grist component’s maximum yield and its weight.
Batch PPG is easy as pie to calculate.  We take the end of boil gravity in gravity points, multiply it by the end of boil total volume, and then divide value by the weight of the grist.
Example:
end_of_boil_gravity = 1.054
end_of_boil_volume = 5.5 gallons
grist_weight = 10lbs
batch_PPG = (end_of_boil_gravity - 1) * 1000 * end_of_boil_volume / grist_weight
batch_PPG = (1.054 - 1) * 1000 * 5.5 / 10 = 29.7 PPG
What this value means is that we extracted 29.7 gravity points from each pound of grist.
Note: In practice, we see that all the " (end_of_boil_gravity - 1) * 1000" part of the equation does is take the fraction to the right of “1” and makes it a whole number. That whole number is known as gravity points.
(1.054 - 1) * 1000 =  54
Let’s say that our grist is composed of 90% base malt, 5% 60L crystal malt, 5% torrified wheat (a fairly common grist in my brew house)
With a 10lb grist, we have 9 pounds of base malt, 1/2 pound of 60L crystal malt, and 1/2 pound of torrified wheat.
Let’s use the following maximum per pound yields for the grist.
base malt = 37 PPG
crystal 60 = 35 PPG
torried wheat = 36 PPG
Our grist component table
37, 9
35, 0.5
36, 0.5
Calculating the weighted maximum yield, we have:
weighted_maximum_yield_in_PPG =  ((37 * 9) + (35 * 0.5) + (36 * 0.5)) / 10 = 36.85

Calculating the extraction efficiency, we have:
extraction_efficiency = batch_PPG / weighted_maximum_yield_in_PPG
extraction_efficiency =  29.7  / 36.85 = 0.81 (rounded) or 81%
Now, they key to this calculation being anything other than a pie-in-the-sky metric is having accurate maximum yield values, not statistical average maximum yield values.  The only way to have that data is to perform actual maximum yield tests on all of the malts and unmalted cereal grains one is using in one’s grist.  That is what the big boys do because having an accurate assessment of waste is critical to maximizing profitability (hence, the reason why extraction efficiency is a bean counter’s metric, not a brewer’s metric).  That, my friend, is the Achille’s heel of the extraction efficiency calculators and software available to homebrewers.  Once again, one’s extraction efficiency should not go up or down by changing base malts.  In many ways, homebrewers are using efficiency as a flawed synonym for extraction rate.

12

Actually, I use BS3 with great success.  Regarding the Brew House efficiency, i believe that number is critical for scaling a recipe as well as for creating a new recipe.  While I would never argue any of the fine points you make, I don’t have all the degrees and knowledge you have, nor do i have the ambition to run those calcs with each brew.  Therefore, i use BS3, along with Bru’n water, and I’m making some pretty darn good beer.  My SG’s are always within a couple points of predicted so i see no reason to change.

So, all of your points are well taken and I’m sure they’re very accurate.  But ill hang on to my BS software.

13

Yes, but PPG is directly usable to build and scale grists, extraction efficiency is not, nor is it all that accurate. Let’s take our example above, which is 1.054 @ 5.5 gallons using 10lbs of grain, which yields a batch PPG of 29.7.  We want to have 7.5 gallons of 1.054 wort at the end of boil.  How much grist do we need?  That answer is trivial to calculate.

1.054 in gravity points is 54

We need 54 / 29.7  =  1.82 pounds of malt to make one gallon of 1.054 wort.  How much grist do we need to make 7.5 of 1.054 wort?

1.82 * 7.5 =  13.65lbs

No software needed, it is that simple. This calculation is so simple that one can do it on one’s head.

What happens if our house average extraction rate is different than another person’s extraction rate?  We just merely scale the recipe up or down by dividing their extraction rate by our extraction rate, multiplying the weight of the grist by this result, and then taking that weight and multiplying the individual percentages of each grist component.

Example

Our extraction rate is 29.7 PPG, we get a recipe where the brewer stated an extraction rate of 27 PPG

27 / 29.7 = 0.91 (rounded)

We can then take the other grist weight and multiply it by 0.91 to give us the total grist weight needed to make this recipe in our brew house and then divide it out using the percentage of the grist for each grist component, or we can simply multiply the weight of each grist component by 0.91 to determine how much of each component we need to use.

0.9 * 0.91 = 0.82 (rounded) lbs of base malt
0.5 * 0.91 = 0.46 (rounded) lbs of 60L crystal
0.5 * 0.91 = 0.46 (rounded) lbs of torrified wheat

One of the things that throw new brewers off is that very experienced brewers tend to list grist bills in percentages like I did above instead listing each component of the grist’s individual weight.  Once a brewer has become accustomed to seeing grist bills in percentages and knows his/her extraction rate in PPG, formulating a recipe to meet specific gravity at a specific volume is almost trivial.

With that said, we are not even talking about advanced high school-level math here.  We are talking about a set of equations that require knowledge of basic arithmetic. Knowing how to effectively use these equations is the difference between a being a knowledgeable brewer and a brewer who is dependent on the knowledge of the brewer who wrote the software he/she is using.  A brewer will only get so far without learning and internalizing this information (and much more that brewing software hides).  Learning this information used to be a right of passage for all-grain brewers. Brewing without it required a lot of empirical experimentation to be able to get on the page. Today, many new brewers are foolishly overlooking it, often making the same excuses that you made, but once it is mastered, one will be less dependent on a deterministic finite automaton to do it for him/her.  These are just one set of brewing equations that a master brewer needs to know. Calculating strike and step infusion temperatures are an entirely different set of equations that require a basic, but approachable by most understanding of thermodynamics. Brewing is not cooking.

14

regardless if there is a difference in performance between 86 billion and 100 billion cells, its not good that White Labs is not being truthful on their packaging. This is not the first time that Whitelabs has been in hot water. remember their contaminated commerical pitches?

15

The reality is that cell size makes a difference in maximum cell density and the outcome between 86 billion cells and 100 billion cells is in the noise due to the exponential growth of yeast biomass.  The difference makes only a small difference in time between maximum cell density being met in the pitched wort.  It is a fraction of a replication period.  Where we get into trouble is when we seriously under pitch a batch, which is highly unlikely for the average 5 or 10-gallon batch today.

16

^^^ This ^^^

Plus, per the verbiage you provided “made to contain” is not the same as saying “contains”

17

Wonder if this guy is why White Labs QC reports are much more generalized now and only say “up to x number of cells” instead of listing the actual cell count on day yeast was tested, like they used to be.

18

Better than throwing BeerSmith, or anything else Saccharomyces bad mouths, away would be to ignore this pompous ass. He has biased about almost everything and his ego elevates them above reality. Your choice, Saccharomyces or reality.

19

I’ve been brewing for about 25 years.  I’ve never used brewing software and usually just ignore all software discussions.  But I’m interested, why do people use it?  Maybe this should be a new discussion.

20

We can move this to a new discussion if required.

Here’s why I started using software:  No other reason than to say I was inexperienced and didn’t have someone guide me through. I learned by reading and watching videos (still do).

So, when it came to recipes, the way I learned was to take an existing recipe and input it into my software of choice which applies my system limitations and idiosyncrasies to get the desired outcomes (OG, IBU, color, etc).

I have since learned to do those calculations manually but old habits die hard and software is SO easy. Which is why I still use software: I can take a recipe from another brewer and have it redesigned for my system and ingredients in ~ a minute. IBU, grain bill percent, water profile, SG:BU ratio, etc all done quickly.

I also like the style guidelines reference and old recipe storage built in.