I have two old Ringwood 1187 smackpacks. One is dated Aug 2011 (!) and the other is a more reasonable November 2011. Since I' m not in any hurry to brew due to the weather being very nice (I use the water bath technique for temperature regulation), I'm tempted to smack them, watch if they swell at all and step the starters to get me to a reasonable level.
I was thinking about 200ml, 600ml and 1,8L, harvest slurry or pitch whole into brew. I'll use both packs for the first step, unless one of them smells sour or doesn't inflate at all*. I'm not really used to stepping up starters, but I want to brew something like a 15L batch of ordinary bitter, so 1.035 to 1.038 OG. MrMalty says that I should have around 100B cells to ferment the bitter.
If I estimate that I have something like 50B cells viable (25% viable) and use my stepping schedule, I should have 136B per billybrew.com spreadsheet, since I won't use O2.
Anything fishy with that ?
* I know that wyeast states that inflation isn't a sign that the yeast is viable or not, but in my very limited experience, a smackpack that doesn't inflate is a bad smackpack.
I was thinking about 200ml, 600ml and 1,8L, harvest slurry or pitch whole into brew. I'll use both packs for the first step, unless one of them smells sour or doesn't inflate at all*. I'm not really used to stepping up starters, but I want to brew something like a 15L batch of ordinary bitter, so 1.035 to 1.038 OG. MrMalty says that I should have around 100B cells to ferment the bitter.
If I estimate that I have something like 50B cells viable (25% viable) and use my stepping schedule, I should have 136B per billybrew.com spreadsheet, since I won't use O2.
Anything fishy with that ?
* I know that wyeast states that inflation isn't a sign that the yeast is viable or not, but in my very limited experience, a smackpack that doesn't inflate is a bad smackpack.