NB Bourbon Barrel Porter

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

BurtonBrews

Member
Joined
Jan 30, 2012
Messages
17
Reaction score
0
Location
Naperville
I just received my NB BBP extract kit in the mail today. I have the Wyeast Scottish Ale Yeast Smack Pack. I have read several threads that indicate that the necessity of a starter with this kit. I have never used a starter before, and was planning on smacking the pack 5-6 hours prior to pitching. For this kit will this be sufficient? Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

:D
 
As I recall, OG of this is 1.070ish, so I'd recommend to either make a starter or drive over to Brew and Grow to get another pack of yeast.

Take a look at the Mr. Malty website (http://www.mrmalty.com/pitching.php) for determining your future yeast pitching rate. You may see Revvy state that a Wyeast smack pack is only sufficient for an OG of 1.030 or less, which the Mr. Malty calculations support.

Best of luck.


Mr. Malty says: "The general consensus on pitching rates is that you want to pitch around 1 million cells of viable yeast, for every milliliter of wort, for every degree plato. A little less for an ale, a little more for a lager. George Fix states about 1.5 million for a lager and 0.75 million for an ale in his book, An Analysis of Brewing Techniques. Other literature cites a slightly higher amount. I'm going with Fix's numbers and that is what the pitching calculator uses.

The Math

If you're curious, here is the simple math to calculate the number of cells needed. For an ale, you want to pitch around 0.75 million cells of viable yeast (0.75 million for an ale, 1.5 million for a lager), for every milliliter of wort, for every degree plato.

(0.75 million) X (milliliters of wort) X (degrees Plato of the wort)

There is about 3785 milliliters in a gallon. There are about 20,000 milliliters in 5.25 gallons
A degree Plato is about 1.004 of original gravity. Just divide the OG by 4 to get Plato (e.g., 1.048 is 12 degrees Plato).


So, for a 1.048 wort pitching into 5.25 gallons you need about 180 billion cells.

(750,000) X (20,000) X (12) = 180,000,000,000

As an easy to remember rough estimate, you need about 15 billion cells for each degree Plato or about 4 billion cells for each point of OG when pitching into a little over 5 gallons of wort. If you want a quick way of doing a back of the envelope estimate, that is really close to 0.75 billion cells for each point of gravity per gallon of wort. Double that to 1.5 billion for a lager."
 
Another vote here for a starter. This is an awesome brew. Definitely one of my best batches. I'd recommend putting a 6-pack or so aside and aging it for a while. I just finally finished a batch from October of 2011 and it only got better with time. Good luck!
 
Brewed it 18 months ago, used just the smack pack, came out just fine. Conditioned in the keg for almost a year. Brewing another this weekend to sit in bottles till christmass of 13.:rockin:
 
According to a calculator I looked at for this kit, you should be pitching around 230 billion yeast cells. Even a fresh smack pack will only yield about 100 billion viable cells at the most. Do a 1L starter and you'll be fine.

I am patiently waiting to start drinking this one!
 

Latest posts

Back
Top