Yeast Starter and 10 Gallon

I want to make my Oatmeal Stout in time for Thanksgiving. I have done this before, but never had a stir plate. I have used WLP004 Irish Ale yeast in the past and had good results. I just would shake up the vial and pour it in each 5 gallon fermentor. But now that I have a stir plate I want to use it. My options that I can think of is:

1. Make my normal 1L starter and put it on at stir plate for 24-36 hours. Cool. Decant. Pitch to 5 gallons of wort. For the other, 5 gallons I could use Safale US-04 (rehydrated of course). It might be a fun experiment, but I would rather not mess with a good thing so.....

2. This is what I would most like to do. Make my normal 1L starter and put in on the stir plate for 24-36 hours. Add 1L more of wort and put it on stir place for another 24-36 hours. Cool. Decant. Split between both 5 gallon buckets. (I have never stepped up a starter before).

3. Some other idea you might have.

Use Mr. Malty's calculator, you can set it to do a starter for a 10 gallon batch using a stir plate.

Bensiff said:

Use Mr. Malty's calculator, you can set it to do a starter for a 10 gallon batch using a stir plate.

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Mr Malty can be funky. For a 5.5 gallon batch with shaking it said 1.73 liters, for a 10 gallon batch (same og, same yeast type) it wanted 6+ liters.

SwampassJ said:

Mr Malty can be funky. For a 5.5 gallon batch with shaking it said 1.73 liters, for a 10 gallon batch (same og, same yeast type) it wanted 6+ liters.

Click to expand...

How many vials of yeast? 1 for the 5.5 gallons and 1 for the 10 gallon then it does not sound off. If you go up to 2 vials on the 10 gallon you don't need as big a starter.

If I'm doing stepping up, I like to reference Wyeast's yeast calc as well since their calc is a multi-step doohickey:

http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_pitchrate.cfm