Notty hydration ?

I'm making a starter tonight for some Notty. The pack states the importance of hydrating the yeast with water before pitching but it occurred to me why can't I skip the hydration step and pour the dry yeast directly into the cooled down starter wort? It's mostly water anyways.

What's the point of the hydration step with water when you have wort?

There was an article on this in the most recent issue of BYO with a long series of tests. Notty was one the many dry types they used. They pretty much came to the conclusion that it made no difference in the end. Notty is a very strong yeast anyway. i wouldn't worry about and just pitch it straight in there.

Generally, its standard wisdom that dry yeasts don't need starters - that there are plenty of viable, healthy cells without it. Is there some special circumstance or reason you are doing a starter?

Starters are counterproductive with dry yeast. Go to Danstar website and read up on the FAQ about not needing to aerate or oxygenate wort when using first generation dry yeast. Once you make a starter or do second generation you then need to do the oxygenation/aeration for proper growth.

The piece you're missing is that dry yeast manufacturers generally recommend against making a wort-based starter if you are using dry yeast. Apparently, as the manufacturer prepared the yeast for drying, some important nutrient reserves were built up. Setting the yeast to fermenting a starter would just deplete them.

So the manufacturer's recommendation is not to rehydrate before adding the yeast to the starter, they want you to rehydrate instead of adding yeast to a starter. Just rehydrate on brew day shortly before pitching.

Anyhow, you can approach this however you'd like, but that is the specific recommendation the manufacturer's making.

Wow, I totally missed that somewhere. I'm glad you guys steered me the right direction in the nick of time. The starter is literally cooling as I write.

I've just made a habit out of making starters over the years but never drew the connection between dry versus liquid since I always use liquid. I assumed they were the same.

Thank you!

Rehydrate at 105F and use some GoFerm nutrient. Rehydrate 30 min prior to pitching the yeast. You can temper the rehyrated yeast with small amounts of your cooled wort until they are within 15F of each other, then pitch.