First time making a starter

Hi,

I'll be brewing a 10 gallon beer shortly using a Wyeast lager style yeast. This means I need 12 million yeast cells/ml.

Using one package of Wyeast Activator, which contains 100 billion yeast cells, I'm trying to determind the volume of starter that I must make. This is what I came up with on their website:




So this means I would need to first inoculate 0.5 gallons of wort at 1.040, and then add that to 1 gallon of wort at 1.040 26 hours later?

Isn't that going to mess up my recipe? 1.5 gallons is a significant volume of liquid. Do I therefore need to include the amount of DME used in the starter to my grain bill, as well as adding 1.5 gallons of top up water to get my specs right?

Thanks for the help

try this site out for putting together your starter. you'll need 1 gm DME per 10 ml of wort to get ~1.04

If you cold crash the starter overnight and decant off the spent wort, you won't need to account for the volume in your calculations.

This is what I get via MrMalty


Am I doing something wrong here? Isn't that kind of crazy, 3 packs of yeast for the starter when the company recommends 4 activators without a starter...

You're doing that in one step, whereas the other one was in two steps. Big difference.

Delaney said:

This is what I get via MrMalty


Am I doing something wrong here? Isn't that kind of crazy, 3 packs of yeast for the starter when the company recommends 4 activators without a starter...

Click to expand...

change the production date, man. i doubt (and hope) your pack of yeast isn't 13 months old.

For some reason that calculator's calendar doesn't go up to 2012...it think's that it's 2011.

I had the same results when I input 100% viability. I think I will do a two stage propagation

Delaney said:

For some reason that calculator's calendar doesn't go up to 2012...it think's that it's 2011.

I had the same results when I input 100% viability. I think I will do a two stage propagation

Click to expand...

according to MrMalty, week old yeast is ~91% viable, FWIW.