Messed up my mash, question about the starter

So quick question:

I ended up with crappy math and had my temperature too high for adding the mash in my BIAB setup. Ended up hitting 169 degrees as soon as the mash started, that's what I get for relying on technology and checking the wrong box on BeerSmith :smack:

I initially was going to wait the 60 minutes and see how the gravity turned out, but I figured that grains are cheap enough and that I would rather start over at the very beginning instead of trying to fix the beer down the line. Which brings me to my starter:

I made my starter a few days ago, cold crashed it, and already decanted it since I expected to pitch it in a couple of hours. So I ended up making a new starter and pitching the yeast in there. I figured I would let it do another cycle there, cold crash it again, and then brew on Tuesday.

Do you guys think the starter should be okay for that?

Yeah, it'll be fine. And just so you know, you didn't need to make another starter. You could've put the yeast back in the fridge and used it when you were ready. It would keep for at least a couple weeks before you would need to think about making another starter to boost the cell count.

Thanks for the info.

Checked the mash and ended up with a pre-boil gravity of 1.008 instead of the 1.042 that I should have had. I guess that is what happens when you kill your enzymes at the verys start! Will try again next week.

Should be fine!

So you decanted your first starter, and pitched into a second starter?

If I'm following, you've made a step starter. A technique used when you need to grow up a ton of yeast from a relatively small amount. Just realize that during your process, you'll have a TON of yeast... way more than you probably planned for. If you made a 2L 1.040 and decanted and pitched into a 2L 1.040, you could have as much as 700b cells, or the equivalent of 7 Wyeast Smack packs. This is dependent on viability, stir plate, etc.

J187 said:

So you decanted your first starter, and pitched into a second starter?

If I'm following, you've made a step starter. A technique used when you need to grow up a ton of yeast from a relatively small amount. Just realize that during your process, you'll have a TON of yeast... way more than you probably planned for. If you made a 2L 1.040 and decanted and pitched into a 2L 1.040, you could have as much as 700b cells, or the equivalent of 7 Wyeast Smack packs. This is dependent on viability, stir plate, etc.

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You may not need to use all of starter yeast. What is not used can be stored and used in a starter later for another batch of beer. Leave enough starter wort to cover the stored yeast.

flars said:

You may not need to use all of starter yeast. What is not used can be stored and used in a starter later for another batch of beer. Leave enough starter wort to cover the stored yeast.

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That's a good point Flars, with that much yeast he could probably just cut it in half and know he's got more than enough going into this beer and still have more than enough to pitch into something else soon.

Got to the brew shop on Tuesday and brewed my beer. Took the starter out of the fridge and decanted it then pitched it a few hours later. It was a strain that I don't use very frequently at all (I don't brew all that much to begin with) so I didn't try to split it and safe parts of it. It was for a Saison and I probably won't make another one until the spring.

So the whole thing went into the wort and it took off like lightning. It's been about 48 hours and it looks like it might even already be finished. The plan was to let it sit for 3-4 weeks before bottling it anyway, but I'm surprised that it might already be finished. If the starter was on the heavy side could there have been enough yeast to already eat up all the sugar?

I'll probably check on the SG once it has been a week just to make sure that nothing happened to the little guys.

Edit: well, curiosity killed the cat.

Took a reading and it went from 1.048 to 1.003 in 48 hours!

Can a fast fermentation like that screw up the beer?