Yeast starter for 50 gallons of wort

Some guys from my homebrew club are planning on a 50 gallon batch. There is already argument over the yeast needed.

I looked on mrmalty.com and it says we should have a starter of 7.6 gallons with 7 vials of yeast in order to get enough viable yeast.

The other guys think that making a 1 gallon starter with one vial of yeast and then pitch that starter into a 10 gallon batch of beer would produce enough yeast for 50 gallons. But, I think there would be a lot of tired out/dead yeast if we did it that way.

It seems like a bad idea to spend so much time, money, and effort into a brew like this and skimp on yeast.

Opinions from HBT?

I put a half gallon starter into 5 gallons of wort for my typical starter which is about 10 % so why wouldnt a 5 gallon batch into a 50 gallon batch work?

I don't think the method of growing the yeast is really that important. Brewing a 5 gallon batch of beer will grow a significant amount of yeast.

Pitching the correct amount is what you should be worried about, you may want to look in to yeast counting for that matter. 50 gallons of 1.060 wort will require 2,084,000,000,000 yeast cells. At 4.5 million cells a ml that is almost a 1/2L of thick yeast slurry.

As long as the 10g batch is NOT high gravity (ie something around 1.040 SG) you will have plenty of healthy, happy yeast to pitch into a 50g batch. Just calculate how much slurry to pitch using Mr Malty's calculator: http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html

GT

Oh, ok well if it'll be healthy enough yeast then i guess im wrong.