Amount of Yeast

Hi,
This is probably the third thread I've started in the past few weeks and wanted to say thank you for all the help. Anyway, I was given a saison recipe and am getting ready to start it but have some questions about the yeast. This only my second brew so please bare with me. The recipe calls for Wyeast 3711 but the homebrew shop by me only had Wyeast 3726 which is also a farmhouse yeast. My equipment is only for 2 gallons but the yeast is for 5...can I just measure out and use 40% of it?

Also in my first kit the yeast was a dry yeast so I just poured it in and vigorously stirred. With this liquid yeast do I need to aerate the wort after following the Wyeast instructions?

Thank you!

Welcome to the greatest hobby ever!

I've not used the farmhouse strain yet (my LHBS was out) but there are a couple of threads here singing it's praises. Sounds like you got a winner!

I'd suggest you pitch about 40% as you proposed, and make a starter with the rest, decant & save it for your re-brew of this Saison! It's easy to do and you'll get your next batch's yeast for 1/2 price

I agree with piratwolf. pour out just shy of half the yeast and make a starter and decanting......

you always need to do some type of aeration for a beer but for the size of beer your doing the splashing the wort makes as it enters your fermenter is probly sufficient. shaking your fermenter around for a minute or 2 wouldnt hurt tho

Or you could just make a starter with the whole smack pack and pitch half of that and save the rest.

With any wort you should aerate before pitching yeast. Yeast need oxygen to reproduce healthy before really digging into the sugars during fermentation.

For dry yeast, you should rehydrate in appropriate-temperature water; not doing so reportedly kills about half the cells straightaway. Luckily dry yeast has a good initial cell count, so it's not a huge problem, but a healthy fermentation is one of the steps to great-not-just-good beer.

For liquid yeast, you should really make a starter for a 5g batch of any not-super-low gravity. The vials and smack packs don't really have enough cells to ideally ferment a 5g batch. For a 2g batch, you *could* measure out half of the contents, but at the risk of some contamination (especially for the fraction of yeast that you store). I'd probably just pitch all the yeast as-is (no starter) and be confident you have a good healthy yeast population.

Cheers…

Thanks for all the replies. I'm not sure what you guys mean when you say make a starter then pitch and such. I was just planning on following the directions on the back of the Wyeast packet. Is there more that I should do?

You should look into making yeast starters. It's much better than using yeast strait from the pack. Do a forum search. BTW, "pitching" means adding the yeast to the wort.

Cheers

I hated doing it when I first started but it really did improve the beer. You only need to do it with liquid yeast. I went on you tube to watch videos on how to do it. Cuz I'm a slow learner and had to see it done rather than just read about it

So there shouldn't be a problem if I pitch the entire packet into my two gallon batch?