I know there was a post recently asking for pictures of starters. But that's not what im looking for. Does anyone have pictures of starters built up from a culture?
I'm trying to propagate a starter from a agar slant. but with such low counts will it come out of suspension. And as of now I'm only getting very small trace amounts in the bottom not even enough to turn the the bottom brown. I'm trying to get my technique down.
I would hazard a guess that you are trying to go from a slant to too big of a culture in one step. In the lab, I would go from a plate or slant to a 50 ml culture, then use this to inoculate a larger culture (up to about 500 ml, 1 L in a pinch).
When you are working with such small amounts of yeast a stir plate is definitely in your best interest. When I'm working with single colony forming units of yeast I start with a 10ml starter with a stir plate. I then step up to a 100ml starter than 1000ml.
I do not have pictures of these starters but truthfully they don't look much different. The small starter with 10ml within it doesn't show a whole ton of yeast but it still get slightly cloudy from the yeast. Also, they will look a lot different than your starters as the stir plate doesn't allow the krausen and trub to sit there. If I were making one of these in the near future I would take some pics for you but I have White Labs vials right now that I'm using.