understanding starters

I am trying to understand yeast starters further and am having a difficult time understanding a few things. I have read "How to Brew" and also mrmalty.com on starters. What I am not understanding is what a one or two or four liter starter really means. I understand that you boil 1/2 cup of DME to 1/2 quart of water, chill, then pitch a white labs or wyeast. This would create almost 1/2 liter. Do you double this to get the 1 liter starter? Can you make a larger starter from the beginning? I want to understand mrmalty calculator in more detail. I brew 10 gallon batches so when i enter a 1.050 beer at 10 gallons the results come back with needing 350 billion cells, needing two vials and nearly a 3 liter starter. Do I scale up the original 1/2DME to 1/2quart six times to 3 cups DME to 3 liters with two vials of yeast? Is this how you end up with the 350 billion cells you need for a 10 gallon batch? I will stop typing now, as im sure most will not read all of this but look forward to responses and will continue searching to understand this better.

I'm a little confused with this also. Do you do a standard size. Then cold crash, wash and repitch into larger starter?

There are different methods you can use. What you describe is usually referred to as a step up starter, where you start with e.g. 1 liter, then cold crash, decant and pitch that into a 2 liter starter. This works well because when you step up, you are essentially pitching a large amount of yeast at maximum viability to make a new starter.

The Mr Malty calculator by default assumes you are starting with a certain size container, and then pitching some number of vials/smack packs into that.

If you have a scale, weight works better than volume when measuring DME. The standard seems to be 100 grams of DME to 1 Liter of water. I make 1.5 liter starters and use 150 grams of DME. This gives me an OG of about 1.035. If I ever needed a larger starter for a big beer I would do as weirdboy said and step up my starter to the appropriate size. I also use Mr. Malty when calculating starter sizes.

I know Mr. Malty is very popular and most homebrewers claim it is a wonderful tool to use when preparing their starters, but I also find it very confusing and don't use it at all myself. It seems to me he is trying to make a very precise calculations using very fuzzy inputs. I usually just make a 1l starter when I'm making an average beer around 1040-1060, make a 2l starter for bigger beers, and if I'm making a monster barleywine or super strong ale I'll make a smaller beer first and use the cake.

To (try to) answer your question, although I admit I am guessing, I interpret the reference to a "1 liter starter" to mean you are pitching the yeast pack or vial onto approx. 650 ml of wort, leaving about 350 ml of headspace in the 1 l flask for kreusen. I could be wrong, but that is how I would interpret it. If I wanted to make a 3 l starter, I would probably make a 1 l starter several days before brewday, decant it after a day and pitch the yeast into a 2 l starter.

A one liter starter would mean adding DME and water equal to the one liter mark. Less in this case is less. I find Mr M to be a great guide, I don't religiously make a starter to the exact specs as you point out the math going in is fuzzy, like yeast viability, etc.

I think my interpretation of the reference to a 1 liter or 2 liter starter and what it means comes from the Northern Brewer instructions, which is how I learned to make them:

http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/YeastStarter.pdf

These instructions are less precise than Mr. Malty, but I am a less precise kind of guy. However, I note that this actually says it is making a "1 pint starter in a 1000 ml flask", which means I was likely wrong in my interpretation of the phrase "1 liter starter".

MrWhleDr said:

What I am not understanding is what a one or two or four liter starter really means.

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If you were to make a 1G beer you come up with X number of cells at the end, If you make a 5G beer you come up with Y cells at the end and so forth. A 1L, 2L, etc starter is basically that--a certain amount of sugar and volume will be required to grow X or Y # of yeast cells. Mr Malty helps us to understand this by showing the relationships a bit. I tend to think it's more confusing than useful for my purposes, but then again I've only made 5G batches. I would bet it becomes more useful as batch sizes get bigger and vary.

Also agree with other poster about measuring weight not volume on the DME....

I tend to do like Big Belgian does, and in 2 years of brewing--it has never served me wrong. Then again, quite a few people on here argue that reusing a yeast cake is a bad idea (overpitching) and it's never failed to turn out much higher quality beers for me.

Big_Belgian said:

I know Mr. Malty is very popular and most homebrewers claim it is a wonderful tool to use when preparing their starters, but I also find it very confusing and don't use it at all myself. It seems to me he is trying to make a very precise calculations using very fuzzy inputs. I usually just make a 1l starter when I'm making an average beer around 1040-1060, make a 2l starter for bigger beers, and if I'm making a monster barleywine or super strong ale I'll make a smaller beer first and use the cake.

Click to expand...