How to grow the most yeast?

I want to make a 5 gallon starter for a big beer, and I was wondering which way would make more yeast or would it be the same?

A) Pitch a big starter into 5 gallons of beer and let it ferment out

B)Pitch a big starter into 1 gallon of beer let it ferment out then add another gallon of wort and ferment that out, continue stepping up until I have 5 gallons of beer

How big of a beer? Ale or lager? It's tough to say without specific numbers, but to address what (I think) may be your concerns:

Our starters ferment a bit warmer (~72F) on a stir plate to promote good growth. If the wort you're pitching into is >1.090 it could do with a second dose of aeration about 12-18 hours after lobbing the yeast (rousing can help if you're worried it's not attenuating as well as it should). When the beer is within a few points of where you're looking to hit your FG, you may want to consider raising the ambient temperature a few degrees for a few days (~5F-ish) to keep the yeast active and prevent them from becoming dormant (when fermentation dies down, so does the heat generated by it). This'll help them more fully attenuate the beer and keep them up longer to clean up after themselves.

As far as specific numbers for your starter, it's hard to say without numbers on your end. Mr Malty calculator can be a good go-to. General rule of thumb is .75 million cells/ml of wort/Plato for ales and 1.5 million cells/ml of wort/Plato for lagers. For your big beer (again, not sure how big you're talking) could be as much as 2 liters of starter for an ale, or 4 liters for a lager.

i think with the stepping method of 1 gallon at a time you'd eventually be way overpitching and likely not produce the healthiest yeast

Jamil recommends increasing the amount of wort for each step ~5+ times of the previous amount

terrapinj said:

i think with the stepping method of 1 gallon at a time you'd eventually be way overpitching and likely not produce the healthiest yeast

Jamil recommends increasing the amount of wort for each step ~5+ times of the previous amount

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+1

Yeast health should be the most important thing. For any big beer I make I just make a low gravity 5 gal batch and then use some/all of the cake. Bonus - you get 5 gallons of tasty beer instead of dumping a bunch of nasty starter beer.

If you are making a huge beer, >1.090, just make a small beer first.

For a RIS I made recently, I made a batch of 1.045 OG stout first and just cleaned the yeast and used it.

You will run into the law of diminishing returns if try stepping it the way you are thinking of. Ideally you would want to take a ten fold step up from the previous step to maintain maximum growth rate, (or at minimum a 5 fold step
). so if you pitched a 1gallon (4L) starter first you would need to pitch that into 40L to maintain the most efficient growth rate.

Like beerkrump said, it would me much more efficient to brew a lower gravity 5 gallon beer and rinse the yeast cake to collect the yeast you need for the big beer.

Another plus is that you have something to drink when you bottle the big beer.

Another good option is to use multiple packages of dry Yeast.

That all makes sense. So I have a big beer (O.G. 1.234) now sitting at 1.100 and I have oxygenated and pitched 4 packs of 1118 twice. It goes crazy for a few hours and then it drops a point or two and that is it.

I was inspired by the article of a guy who brewed an all-grain 21 % beer and the way way over the top Utopia thread but now I'm stuck.

So I thought it would be fun to brew a 1.050 O.G. hoppy session beer for the summer (using up a good bit of my hops from last season), and pitch some 1118 yeast. Then I would use the cake to hopefully tear into my stuck monster?