Stepping up your yeast

Hi all, I want to start with a sample of the yeast off the bottom of either a hoegarrden or a duvel, leffe and go from 1000ml flask to my 5000ml flask. Has anyone grown there starter that much? What was your experience?

Pretty much - I stepped up the dregs of one bottle of Bells Wonter White to 1L and then pitched it into a 2.5 gal batch and it fermented out to 1.012 or so in a couple days, so if you think of my 2.5 gal batch as 5L (I think my math is close) then it worked fine for me.

Oops! My math isnt close at all!

Probably should search harvesting from bottles. I believe they start with lower gravity starter and then increase gravity and amount as you start seeing the yeasties

First I would figure out what your pitch rate needs to be. When you say go to your 5000ml flask, are talking about making a 5000ml starter for your beer? Or keep it around 3-4000ml.

Best thing to do is to make a 2000ml starter in your 5000ml flask. This should get you to about 200 billion cells. Then if you add another 2000ml on top of that you will create another 100 billion cells.

However if you start with 1000ml your cell count will increase to about 150 billion cells. And if you add another 1000ml to that you wont increase by another 50 billion, but only by about 18 billion. So you would have 168 billion.

Again figure out what your pitch rate needs to be because you will most likely not need a 5000ml starter.

Edit* It also depends on your vitality and viability or the yeast your gonna reuse..

Im guessing to bottle culture and reuse will lead to something that could be viable, perhaps a simple mini recipe test instead, of a full blown investment of ingredients for a full batch, I am trying to end up with enough good yeast to create a ten gallon batch of a duvel clone. thanks for the info.