9 Liter Yeast Starter?

Has anyone ever heard of using a 9 Liter Yeast Starter? This would be near 3 gallons of a yeast starter.

People use different sized yeast starters for all sorts of different beers. The larger the beer, the larger the starter. I have personally never made a 2.5 gallon starter, but I know that 1 gallon starters are very common here on HBT. Why exactly do you feel you need a 9L starter?

This is from BYO recipe from last month's magazine. They claim that the proper pitch rate is 4 packages of liquid yeast or a 9 Liter starter. The recipe is for a 5 gallon batch.

You're not pouring in 9 liters of liquid though... when you do a larger starter, pour off the spent starter wort and use some new wort to get the yeast cake out of the starter container and into your fermentor. This way, you aren't diluting your wort with lower gravity starter wort. That said, 9 liters sounds huge. Not sure what kind of beer would necessitate that.

High gravity beer with a "simple starter", that seems very reasonable. Some people just make a smaller beer and use that as a starter, some will use a stir plate which allows you to use a much smaller starter. In this case, a 9 liter starter becomes a 3.4 liter starter.

It's a Bohemian Pilsner. I guess I'll make the 9 liter starter and rack off the wort and pour the new wort on top of the yeast cake.

I have never done this large of a starter before. The starter is almost the same size as the batch itself. I have a couple of questions here if someone could help:

1) Since I am planning to remove the wort and just use the yeast cake how long would you let this ferment as a yeast starter?

2) As this is a lager would you ferment your yeast starter at lagering temperatures?

Thanks.

I've made a 8-9 L starter before. Then I never ended up using it. That was kind of a bummer. I just never got around to brewing the batch.

perhaps it's a typo and should have been a .9 liter (one quart) starter...

http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html

Play around with it. Even shaking once in a while makes a big difference on how big of a starter you need.

1. Long enough to ferment out. A few days usually does it.
2. No. If it's just a starter, the off flavors from higher temps don't matter, and the yeast will be more active at higher temps.

I looked at that Mr. Malty link too. According to that link a 1.056 OG 5.25 Gallon Lager should need a 4.18 Liter starter. But the recipe calls for a 9 liter starter?

You missed the slider on the bottom. That's 4.18 liters with 2 packets of yeast. Moving the slider over, it calculates over 10 liters with 1 packet.

That one big a$$ starter. It's more cost effective to use another yeast packet than brew nearly a 5 gallon batch of wort that you're going to discard.

Then don't discard it. Brew a smaller lager that you can use a smaller starter with, then use the yeast cake for this beer.

Either that or shake the starter once in a while like I mentioned before.

tgentry2 said:

I have never done this large of a starter before. The starter is almost the same size as the batch itself. I have a couple of questions here if someone could help:

1) Since I am planning to remove the wort and just use the yeast cake how long would you let this ferment as a yeast starter?

2) As this is a lager would you ferment your yeast starter at lagering temperatures?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

I brew lagers almost exclusively. They require a large starter and do best if the starter is grown at fermenting temps ( 48f - 52f ). The starter should have oxygen to get maximum growth, so the starter beer will have very little alcohol and taste like crap. Oxygen may come from the air while on a stir plate, or from a tank through a stone if not stirred. That's why I made this:



The easiest way was sugessted above, that being to brew a small beer, then use the cake to ferment the larger beer. No wort is wasted that way.

I use a third method, that being to remove 2 gallons on wort to a starter jar and pitch the yeast, put it on the stir plate until at high krausen, then return to the main wort which has been in the cooler. Hope this helps..... cheers

when i made my oktoberfest i needed about 400 bil yeast cells. instead of doing one extremely large starter (9L no aeration), i started with 2 L and after 24 hours of shaking it as often as possible i chilled, decanted the liquid. i then added 2 more L onto that yeast. shaking it as often as possible. according to the yeast calc i made about 430 cells. pitched at 50 degrees and was bubbling away within a few hours.

i like this yeast calc

http://www.yeastcalc.com

The option I like the best for super-high cell counts is to repitch slurry. You get a lot of healthy yeast at very low cost and with hardly any trouble. This is easy to do if you schedule your beers the right way.

Alternatively pitching dry yeast gets your cell count up with very little trouble.

osagedr said:

The option I like the best for super-high cell counts is to repitch slurry. You get a lot of healthy yeast at very low cost and with hardly any trouble. This is easy to do if you schedule your beers the right way.

Alternatively pitching dry yeast gets your cell count up with very little trouble.

Click to expand...

Totally agree, and IMO the lager pitch on a cake comes out cleaner than when it is the first generation pitch. When I do my beers I try to plan a schedule to reuse the yeast.

Dog House Brew said:

Totally agree, and IMO the lager pitch on a cake comes out cleaner than when it is the first generation pitch. When I do my beers I try to plan a schedule to reuse the yeast.

Click to expand...

Early in my career I pitched on the entire cake a few times. I generally wouldn't anymore; rather I use just enough slurry to do the job--typically a cup or less, but sometimes more for very high-gravity brews.