What the hell is a starter? Have I just been lucky

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Patirck

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I am some what new to home brewing - started about 4 months ago and have made 5 batches - 3 AG. It's been very tasty so far. I have made some higher gravity beers - in fact most are high gravity - the lowest is 1.050.

I have only used the wyeast smack packs and the WL vials. I have smacked the pack and watch it expand over 3 - 12 hours. I have taken out the WL vials from the fridge and let it warm up for 3 or 4 hours. I then have added the contents of the smack pack / vial to the cooled wort.

I have never made a starter. I went to a brewing lesson at the LHBS and was shown at that point - don't even worry about the doing the smack pack thing - just let it warm to room temperature and add it to wort.

I'm not say that making a starter is a waste of time, but my beer has turned out pretty good - certainly very drinkable and some of it very high avb (10.25% for my aventinus clone).

Am I missing something here? Have I just gotten lucky?:D
 
Certain yeast strains can handle it w/o a starter, german weizen yeasts and most ale yeasts included. You're also less likely to notice off flavors in robust, flavorful beer styles like those you've been brewing. When you decide to brew a delicate lager or high-gravity Belgian without a starter you'll see why you'd want to do one.
 
The problem with not "smacking" the pack is that you can't be 100% sure that you're pitching viable yeast. This also wakes the yeast up and gets them ready to go to work.

I'm glad that you've been fortunate enough to make good high-gravity beers without using a starter, but I'd bet that if you began making starters that your beer would be even better. Under-pitching is not typically a good thing...
 
you can make beer - sometimes even really good beer - without a starter. But they will never ever be all that they could have been if you'd made a starter. It's more than just an extra bit of insurance to make sure that the beer doesn't come out a little off, your yeast literally make your beer, so treat them right.
 
My seconds strongest beer so far is still in the fermenter (secondary). It is a Karmeleit klone (Belgian Tripel) that was made with WL500 straight out of the vial. Hope it comes out. I'll know in a month or so.
 
I make a starter for 2 reasons.
1. To ensure the yeast is good before I brew my batch and pitch.
2. So I can cultivate the yeast and freeze vials in a frozen bank for reuse.

I have also found that with a starter I see signs of fermentation within a few hours. If I pitch straight to the wort it can take a couple of days to see activity.
 
The problem with not "smacking" the pack is that you can't be 100% sure that you're pitching viable yeast. This also wakes the yeast up and gets them ready to go to work.

I'm glad that you've been fortunate enough to make good high-gravity beers without using a starter, but I'd bet that if you began making starters that your beer would be even better. Under-pitching is not typically a good thing...

Though sometimes it is; making a big starter is going to reduce esters (among other things), which is great in a clean pale ale or lager but might be counterproductive in a hefeweizen.
 
I'm not say that making a starter is a waste of time, but my beer has turned out pretty good - certainly very drinkable and some of it very high avb (10.25% for my aventinus clone).

Most of us are going for more than "drinkable". To make the best beer you can, you need to pay attention to other factors, including yeast pitching rate.
 
I had a White Labs vial fail recently and it was with a starter. The problem was I wasn't totally sure if the vial was bad or was I just not seeing the results. I still have no idea why that one failed.

You could say the starter was a help in that case since I could see a potential problem (which was later confirmed when the fermenter did nothing for a few days). But the result was the same in that I had to go to the store and get some more yeast. So what did I really save? I still had to go get more yeast and by using the starter I had extra wort that wasn't the exact profile as my recipe. But my procedure is to make the starter the day before I brew so I don't give myself much time to adjust for a bad starter.

A negative aspect of the starter is that it increases the chances for failure. Plus it also increases your equipment needs unless you have a spare gallon jug around.

For my last two batches I gave up on the starter. One was a trippel clone and Mr Malty wanted me to try and make a starter over 2 liters. Well, the beaker I bought was 2 liters so I had no chance of doing that. Instead I went with 2 vials as per the instructions from AHS. Not sure of the result yet. The other was just a weizen and I was just too lazy to do a starter so I got two vials as suggested by the book.
 
I make starters to ensure viability, and grow a healthy amount of yeast for a shortened lag time, and quicker healthier fermentation.

Having said that, I wash yeast, and there is no way that I would brew a batch without making a starter for some yeast that I washed 3-6 months ago.

With liquid cultures usually running around $7-8, washing and making starters can save quite a bit of money.
 
Hmm. Has anybody else listened to the two pod casts from BBN? According to the experiments they have run (Nov 12, 2009 and May 13, 2010 episodes), under-pitching might not be quite as bad as we have thought. Most of the people in the experiment could tell the difference between an underpitched beer and one pitched at the right cell count, but there was some disagreement as to which one tasted better.

I can see the argument to test viability, but I am not quite sold on the definitive "makes better beer". I will likely continue making starters, but I also think I won't let the lack of a starter stop me from brewing when the weather is nice.
 
I have. While they're interesting to hear, with such a small sample group and marginal variable control, they're statistically meaningless.

I was actually really happy to get 30 responses. What variables would you have liked to see controlled better? With the exception of the pitching rate, the beers were handled identically in every way I can think of.

Sean
 
I guess what I've learned so far is that making a starter will allow me to harvest yeast to use for the next batch and in turn save me some money. That's great but so far I have yet to use the same yeast twice. Perhaps if I do something fairly generic that I know I'll use again I'll give it a try. Right now, the novelty is still there and I like to make a bunch of different things.
 
I was actually really happy to get 30 responses. What variables would you have liked to see controlled better? With the exception of the pitching rate, the beers were handled identically in every way I can think of.

Sean

I'm especially referring to the BBR/BYO experiment. I would have to go back and listen to it again, but at the top of my list would be fermentation temperature. Sitting two vessels side by side with different pitching rates almost guarantees that there will be a difference in temperature when we're dealing with an exothermic process. So now we're throwing another variable in, one that is known to have a large impact on the finished beer. At an even more basic level, how do we even know that what was in each vessel was exactly the same? How many of the people conducting this test just racked to one vessel then racked to the next? You can very, very easily have different things in the fermenter to start with.

Even forgetting all of that and looking at your results, you're still working from a single datapoint as far as the beers go. You can't make general conclusions on anything from a single datapoint, especially when dealing with a biological process.
 
here's an anecdote that might help show the value of a starter.

i made a big belgian kriek with some sour cherries a couple months back. the initial yeast strain (which i used a starter for) took it down to a gravity of 1.020, but then stopped completely. i had some Nottingham dry yeast packs in the fridge and I was in a hurry to leave town, so I took one out, briefly rehydrated it for the 15 minutes advised by the instructions, and pitched it.

five days later, not a single sign of fermentation. i measured the gravity: still 1.020. so, i took another Nottingham yeast pack from the fridge and made a starter. After 24 hours, the yeast was bubbling away in the starter and I pitched it. This time, within 6 hours, the yeast went to work on my kriek and a nice krausen formed. The yeast with the starter brought it to a nice finish....
 
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