Yeast Starters??

What are the benefits of doing a starter yeast rather them just adding the contents of the package into the chilled wort?

And how do you go about making starter yeast?

Thanks,
John

Main benefit is that it increases the amount of yeast you are pitching. While Wyeast and White Labs both claim their products are pitchable (and many people do with decent results), making a starter will help decrease your lag time and result in a healthier fermentation.

The best instructions I have found for making a yeast starter can be found here www.howtobrew.com

There are threads on here for making starters.

My method (and I don't measure anything very carefully) is:

1 quart of water and a heaping cup of DME.
Boil for 10 minutes.
Cool.
Pour into 1/2 gallon glass milk jug.
Pitch yeast.
Put cap on jug.
Shake to aerate.
Install airlock.
Wait 1 day.

This is my technique. I like to start mine a week in advance to let the yeast go through its complete cycle.

I boil a little over a half gallon of water (to account for some boil off), 1/2 lb of light DME and Wyeast yeast nutrients for 15 minutes. I cool and add the wort to a gallon jug, pitch yeast and shake the crap out of it. I cover with foil and periodically shake until fermentation is complete. I then put in fridge until brew day.

Take the jug out the morning of your brew day and decant most of the liquid off. Let the temp of the yeast come up while you brew. After you brew and are ready to pitch the yeast, swirl what's left in the jug and pitch slurry into wort.

Now if I am going to brew on short notice, I will make a starter with a quart of water and cup of light DME before I brew. This will at least wake the yeast up by the time you are ready to pitch later in the day.

seyahmit said:

Now if I am going to brew on short notice, I will make a starter with a quart of water and cup of light DME before I brew. This will at least wake the yeast up by the time you are ready to pitch later in the day.

Click to expand...

That's what I always do and I always get super fast and vigorous fermentation. Do you get better results with the complete/delayed method?

BrewmanBeing said:

That's what I always do and I always get super fast and vigorous fermentation. Do you get better results with the complete/delayed method?

Click to expand...

I prefer the bigger starter because I am actually increasing my cell count more and getting closer to a proper pitch rate. In a pinch, I will make the quart starter to wake 'em up.

Check out Jamil Zainasheff's website Mr. Malty. He gives a great explanation on proper pitching rates and has a cool new pitch rate calculator.

seyahmit said:

I prefer the bigger starter because I am actually increasing my cell count more and getting closer to a proper pitch rate. In a pinch, I will make the quart starter to wake 'em up.

Check out Jamil Zainasheff's website Mr. Malty. He gives a great explanation on proper pitching rates and has a cool new pitch rate calculator.

Click to expand...

I'm just wondering if you get better results. On a more theoretical level I am wondering what is better (for ultimate flavor) pitching with a larger volume of sleeping yeasts or a smaller volume of recently awakened yeasts?

BrewmanBeing said:

I'm just wondering if you get better results. On a more theoretical level I am wondering what is better (for ultimate flavor) pitching with a larger volume of sleeping yeasts or a smaller volume of recently awakened yeasts?

Click to expand...

I don't think the yeast are sleeping, in fact fermentation takes off within a few hours of pitching. From what I gathered, when you under pitch, the yeast needs to expend more energy reproducing. That is precious energy that could go towards eating the sugar in your wort. Before I started making the bigger starters, I was having a heck of a time getting my FG down below 1.018. I don't have that problem anymore.

In a few weeks I will be able to test that theory. Last weekend, I got together with a few guys from work that are also home brewers. We made a 20 gallon batch of brown ale. I know for a fact that he pitched a WL tube directly into his wort. He said it took forever for fermentation to start. When we all get together again to taste our beers, I will be interested to see how much of a difference there is between the beers and which beer attenuated further.

Thanks man, you got me hooked on the idea of bigger starters. I like dryer beers and higher attenuation sounds good!!!

Keep in mind, cell counts increase while there's oxygen to consume, fermentation happens when there isn't. If you OVER pitch, is there a possibility that the yeast would reach a critical mass (limited by something other than oxygen) that would cause them to all go into fermentation before all the oxygen is metabolized? If this happened, could you actually wind up with oxidized beer as a result? Seems to me that there's a fine balancing act, if you under pitch and don't aerate well, you get a really low final cell count once all the O2 is gone and there's not many yeasties around to ferment, so you get poor attenuation and long fermentations. Aeration during the initial day or so should theoretically fix that. However, if you over pitch you will have plenty of yeasties to ferment, but could potentially leave oxygen in solution. What am I missing?

PS. I don't actually worry about it all that much as above, I make a 750 mL starter in an old bacardi bottle a day or two before I'm set to brew, and I don't even bother to decant, just dump it in.

MattD said:

Keep in mind, cell counts increase while there's oxygen to consume, fermentation happens when there isn't.

Click to expand...

Yeast has two states of metabolism, Aerobic (with Oxygen) and Anaerobic (with out Oxygen). They will expand or divide in both states but will expand slower in the anaerobic state. Yeast don't use Sugar for food like we do in this anaerobic state, but convert the 6carbon sugar to 3carbon intermediates and use those to produce Alcohol and Co2, in the presence of O2 they will convert the Alcohol further into CO2.

Yeast will ferment sugar 30+ times more rapidly while reproducing and expanding than when not reproducing. The energy requirements for reproduction are great when the yeast is copying its genes and making new proteins. In an anaerobic state Yeast will divide at about one division every 12-24hr and in an aerobic state will divide once every 3-4hr.There is a crucial balancing act of adding the proper amount of yeast with the minimum amount of Oxygen dissolved in the Wart, so that as the yeast are in their growth phase and they are in an anaerobic state. As well that when they reach the saturation point where their population is so great they have depleted their nutrients (Stuck fermentation), that the maximum amount of fermentable sugar is converted to Alcohol. If the population of yeast grows too fast they will take longer to convert all fermentable sugar to alcohol because yeast in this non-growing state don't need as much energy.

Yeast as well are sensitive to there environment an when being pitched they will take some time to get accustomed to the wart, and if the temp is a little too high this will make this adjustment a little longer. I use white labs yeast so I don’t have to spend a lot of time calculating the proper number of yeast to pitch. I just let the yeast slowly reach room temp, then put the tube in a water bath at 80ºF for 30min before pitching, I think its well worth the extra $5 that the white labs yeast cost.

I'll try a bigger starter. I never worry much about aeration and it sounds like what you are saying is that aeration is only required to make up for under-pitching?

FYI: I made a 1068 strong pale ale recently and using my "day of" starter method from a Wyeast smack pack it fermented down to 1018 in the secondary 2 weeks after brewing.

Ok. What about if you use a stirplate to get maximum growth out of your starter AND using Oxygenation stones? Is this bad? Will you get oxydized beer since you have a massive starter cell-count?

This is getting confusing to me. I just got a stirplate from Yuri Rage (awesome device), and just received an O2 system. I need to know how much to use of each.

Cheers!

BrewStef

BrewStef said:

Ok. What about if you use a stirplate to get maximum growth out of your starter AND using Oxygenation stones? Is this bad? Will you get oxydized beer since you have a massive starter cell-count?

This is getting confusing to me. I just got a stirplate from Yuri Rage (awesome device), and just received an O2 system. I need to know how much to use of each.

Cheers!

BrewStef

Click to expand...

I bet that this is a good thing for the starter, but you might want to calculate the number of yeast you are pitching. I think (I’m no brew master just a biologist) that the trick is to get the yeast in a good growth phase before pitching, but not to pitch too much and get a stuck fermentation.

Walker-san said:

There are threads on here for making starters.

My method (and I don't measure anything very carefully) is:

1 quart of water and a heaping cup of DME.
Boil for 10 minutes.
Cool.
Pour into 1/2 gallon glass milk jug.
Pitch yeast.
Put cap on jug.
Shake to aerate.
Install airlock.
Wait 1 day.

Click to expand...

could you use a cup of LME?? most of my kits i order from Austin Homebrew come with LME.. so yeah, how do you make one with LME??

or do you just buy that little pack of DME that ive seen at AHB? would that mix ok with LME?

aekdbbop said:

or do you just buy that little pack of DME that ive seen at AHB? would that mix ok with LME?

Click to expand...

DME is just easier to deal with, that's all. Given that LME and DME are pretty much the same thing at the end of the day, at least as far as your yeasts are concerned, you can technically use either one---it's just much easier to measure out fo cup of DME than it is to measure out a cup of LME. The stuff gets everywhere. Ugh. Also, I;m not sure that it matters when making a starter, but since there's water in LME, it means it's slightly less concentrated with sugars than DME---so you should use about 10% more LME than DME---I think that's the right conversion. But optimally, I'd get some DME instead.

Also, I saw your sig: since when does Brooklyn make a nut brown? I thought it was just a brown ale. Or is "BBC" referring to something else...?

yeah bbc is the bluegrass brewing company.. located in KY