Making my first lager (and starter!) couple pretty basic questions

Hi all,

We're stepping boldly into the realm of lagers and starters by creating our own recipe for a Bock! We're very excited. Anyway, I've been doing a ton of research into lagering and aBoch's hop/malt profile. My questions right now involve mostly yeast calucations.

The article I read about starters said that you needed roughly 4 billion cells per point of OG for ales, and double that for lagers. We're going for a fairly strong Boch, with a target OG of ~1.070. That means we'd need 560 billion yeast cells (70*4*2). Mrmalty tells me I'd need 579 billion, so I think that rule of thumb is pretty damn good.

This is where the articles I read became vague. Mr Malty comes to the rescue, though. A two vial starter will need a 9.27 (call it 9.25 for easy measuring) liters of water. That's a little under half of my batch (I like to do 6 gallon batches so I can have extra wort to account for trub loss).

How do you add such a large starter to a beer? There is no way that I can mash and boil correctly while down 2.5 gallons to account for the starter. I could drain the liquid, but would we not lose a lot of yeast?

Another big thing is time. Does a larger starter require more time, or is it always 18-24 hours?

Thanks! I'm so excited.

Try out this calculator.
http://www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitch-rate-and-starter-calculator/
Make a multi step starter to keep the volume of each starter to a manageable size.

Paradigm said:

Hi all,

How do you add such a large starter to a beer? There is no way that I can mash and boil correctly while down 2.5 gallons to account for the starter. I could drain the liquid, but would we not lose a lot of yeast?

Another big thing is time. Does a larger starter require more time, or is it always 18-24 hours?

Click to expand...

I would give yourself more time because in order to not pitch so much starter wort, the best practice is to ferment your starter out and then cool it to drop the yeast and decant the excess liquid. After decanting I usually add in a small amount of wort and put back on the stir plate at my pitching temp while I brew. I find that this both gets the yeast at the same temp as the wort it will be pitched into and in the 4-6 hours while brewing the yeast will become more active and reduce lag time.

Ideally you don't want to add starter worth that is more than 10% of the beer volume so decanting will accomplish this.

You don't pitch all the liquid. Let the yeast settle to the bottom (or stick it in the fridge if it won't settle) and then pour the liquid off. Leave some so you can swirl it back up and dump it in since it's gonna cake on you.

You can ferment the starter warm and at those warm temperatures it will finish in normal time.

The easy way to go about this is to brew a guinea pig. Do a smaller lager that will give you a bunch of good cells to pitch on to. Lagers are usually dry beers so over pitching shouldn't be a concern. Rack the first lager out and pour the new one on the cake.

For lager, a stirplate and O2 injector are valuable, making better beer and less yeast to buy. I do 4l starters for lagers, the gravity determines whether I need 1 or 2 yeast vials. Every one I have made came out fantastic.

I didn't even aerate my first lager I made last month. The wyeast pack was over a year old and froze a few times over the winter. Just 2 liter starter( i even robbed this to fill a vial for next time) and it turned out great.

+1 to making a smaller beer first. Make a 2 gallon batch of a smaller lager, then rack the wort onto the yeast cake. You'll have the right number if cells and more beer to drink!


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flars said:

Try out this calculator.

http://www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitch-rate-and-starter-calculator/

Make a multi step starter to keep the volume of each starter to a manageable size.

Click to expand...

Every single time I get to that website thru links here on HBT, I'm on 5-10 seconds and the site vanishes into a blank screen. Idk what I need to do but I hope any members may be tech savvy enough to trouble shoot why. Thanks in advance!


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