Building a starter

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OzarkPA

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I'm reading Palmer's book and am confused on step 5 on page 74 - it says 'this starter has been built up twice' but doesn't explain how to build it up - so I must have missed something! Are you pouring off the fermented wort and adding the dregs back to another pint of fresh wort to multiply the yeast?
 
You add more boiled dme/water to the flask. You can opt to decant some or all of the previous "starter beer" off or not. If I am building up a huge starter I usually will do a couple "feedings" then drain off a lot of the beer, and then do a final feeding and pitch all of that on brew day.
 
In all of the books, and all of the online stuff, this is the one area that is so very poorly explained.
 
Whew - if the folks with that many posts say that then I don't feel so stupid asking then. Actually it's not too tough to take instruction since I've been into sourdough baking for a while. The smells tell you there's a lot in common!
 
Revvy said:
You add more boiled dme/water to the flask. You can opt to decant some or all of the previous "starter beer" off or not. If I am building up a huge starter I usually will do a couple "feedings" then drain off a lot of the beer, and then do a final feeding and pitch all of that on brew day.

Dragging up an old thread here - but when you build a starter, do you just use the flocculated slurry to estimate your pitching rate?
 
You can trick Mr. Malty into calculating stepped starter rates, but the Wyeast calculator is actually quite a bit easier for that. Otherwise, the growth tables are published in Chris White's book Yeast, and you can estimate growth from that. (Key word here is estimate...many assumptions are being made by these calculators, which can cause them to be significantly off.)
 
So is there a public domain estimate for the slurry (I assume you just pitch the slurry and not the wort)? Ie, 1 cup slurry = 1 billion cells etc? I know it's just an estimate but I would lose count at about 126,392 and then have to start over when my depends blow up.
 
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