2-3 Hour Starter...right for this situation?

So I harvested about 3 cups or yeast slurry / 500 Billion cells from my last batch. I plan on pitching about 300 billion of them into my next batch this Staurday.

My question is; would making starter 2-3 hours prior to pitching be right for this instead of overnight? I just want to awaken the yeast from their dormant state currently. I do not want to grow any more cells (I have more than enough!) just rouse them back into the normal hungry roused state they are most productive at without shocking them by directly pitching the slurry.

Just looking for confirmation as this makes sense to me but I don't want to overlook anything...

If you have the proper amount of cells already, why "awaken them"?

iijakii said:

If you have the proper amount of cells already, why "awaken them"?

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Seems right?

My wort will be 1.070 and thought it would be proper to ease them from a dormant state to a 1.040 starter state to a final 1.070 state. Is this unnecessary then?

It's not a lot of extra work for me (and no extra expense), if anything I think it will help reduce lag time...?

Yes, it would be fine to make a quick starter to get the harvested yeast going.

When did you harvest the slurry from your last batch?

My last batch I harvested the slurry and directly pitched a half cup into my wort I brewed that day. There was still about a 12 hour lag time (I'm wondering if I underpitched), but the fermentation went strong for 3 days so it seems to have went well.

brodie113 said:

Yes, it would be fine to make a quick starter to get the harvested yeast going.

When did you harvest the slurry from your last batch?

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Feb 12th, not too old...I'm guessing it will be at about 70-71% viability based on Mr. Malty pitching rate calc.

JNish said:

My last batch I harvested the slurry and directly pitched a half cup into my wort I brewed that day. There was still about a 12 hour lag time (I'm wondering if I underpitched), but the fermentation went strong for 3 days so it seems to have went well.

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Try http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html to find the best pitching rate you may have pitched correctly depending on your OG and how thick the slurry was!

I wouldn't bother with the starter.

DannPM said:

Try http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html to find the best pitching rate

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I did but the "Yeast Concentration" dial is quite vague. The slurry seemed quite thick to me, barely moved when I tipped the bucket, so I moved the dial to 3B/ml. So I pitched 1/3 cup (not 1/2) of slurry into my 1.060 wort. It was WLP002 English Ale yeast, and I gotta say that is the weirdest yeast I've worked with. It is described as "very high flocculation" and, when you resuspend it, forms coagulated blobs that I can only describe as appearing like spoiled milk.

It would be nice to have a better way to determine the concentration of yeast cells since the density of slurry can depend on the flocculation of the yeast.

JNish said:

I did but the "Yeast Concentration" dial is quite vague. The slurry seemed quite thick to me, barely moved when I tipped the bucket, so I moved the dial to 3B/ml. So I pitched 1/3 cup (not 1/2) of slurry into my 1.060 wort. It was WLP002 English Ale yeast, and I gotta say that is the weirdest yeast I've worked with. It is described as "very high flocculation" and, when you resuspend it, forms coagulated blobs that I can only describe as appearing like spoiled milk.

It would be nice to have a better way to determine the concentration of yeast cells since the density of slurry can depend on the flocculation of the yeast.

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I agree with it being vague so I max out the non-yeast percentage to 25% and rate the slurry at 1.2 since what I have is of very different thickness from top of container to the bottom. I just downloaded BrewStrong espisode on repitching yeast with JZ (who made the calc) hoping to get some insight from this episode (and will post if I figure anything out from it on this topic!)

Holy Crap! About half way through the show and Jamil is saying likes to add some fresh wort ~4 hours prior to pitching if the yeast is about 2 weeks old to "wake up" the yeast!

Score! :cross: I'm thinkin' like Jamil

Gotta love BrewStrong... after they've gone through their 15 minutes of plugging for Blichmann.