Building multi step starters

Simonh82 said:

I'm having some yeast sent to me from the Wibbler Brewery in Essex, England. They send you a 35mm vial of yeast, which I guess will be pretty thick slurry.

If I want to build this up to a starter and particularly if I want to overbuild to harvest some yeast again I know I'm going to do a couple of steps for the starter.

Can I just check if I should be cold crashing and decanting the liquid from each step of the starter as I build it up. I'm using the calculator at http://www.brewunited.com/yeast_calculator.php

For instance if I want to end up with a 2 litre starter and step up with a 1 litre and 1.5 litre steps. Should I be decanting off the spent wort, leaving just the slurry and filling it up to the next step's volume, or should I just be topping up the first step with an extra half litre each time?

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TheMadKing said:

You should be decanting between each step, as the alcohol from the previous steps doesn't do your yeast health any good.


EDIT: I'm assuming the volume of your 35mm test tube of slurry is ~3mL of slurry at 2.5 billion cells per mL, so 7.5 billion cells to start with, and I ran it through the brewers friend calculator. You will want your first starter step to be 250 mL. As a general rule you don't want to grow your yeast cells by more than a factor of 10 in a single step. After that 250ML step, I would go up to 1L, then 2L

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