Is cold crashing a starter in the freezer faster?

I made my starter last night. Should be ready by 10pm tonight (24 hrs). The problem is I have to leave town Wednesday so I don't have an extra 24 hours to crash it and brew. I have to brew tomorrow night. Will putting it in the freezer for a while and then transferring to the fridge work?

The only issue I would see is your stressing the yeast by quickly crashing like that. You just spent all the effort to build a starter which is helping provide healthy stress free yeast, now you will turning around and stressing them out. Seems counter productive to me. If your starter wort is less than 5% of your total recipe, just dump the whole thing in instead of decanting it. Of course that is completely dependent on what your brewing as to whether that's an option.

Well its 2.5 L starter for 5 gallons. If my math is correct, that's 13%.

Freezing the yeast can damage/kill the yeast. You can leave it in the fridge for 12 hours and not have any issues decanting.

The other thing to consider is whether you are using a stir plate or not. A 2.5L starter could be done fermenting in 24 hours on a stir plate. If no stir plate it can take more than 24 hours to be done, in which case you can leave it as is until you brew and pour the whole starter into the wort. This would be what I'd do since I would be a bit more worried about under pitching rather than altering the taste of the beer. If you used light DME the flavor shouldn't change too much. Also a 2.5L starter is rather large, meaning your yeast must be old depending on the gravity of your wort. I would make sure your starter is fully finished before pitching. I have a feeling it will take longer than 24 hours without a stir plate.

I am using a stir plate. I'm using WLP 530 if that helps. Would 20 hrs of cold crashing be enough to let it floc out?

I haven't used that strain, but have definitely used ~12 hours of crashing before decanting a starter, you should be fine.

Go right from the stir plate to a bowl of ice water for an hour to get a head start on the flocculation. I've done it once and it seemed to help.

StrongBad42 said:

I am using a stir plate. I'm using WLP 530 if that helps. Would 20 hrs of cold crashing be enough to let it floc out?

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Yes...20 hrs will be plenty. I've cold crashed a starter for 12 hours before with no issues. That strain of yeast has medium-high flocculation...http://www.whitelabs.com/yeast/wlp530-abbey-ale-yeast

Thanks for the replies everyone. I feel better now. I'll just crash it for 20 hours and brew. Thanks for your help!