Brewers Friend pitching rate calculator says yes.
I just chuck the rest of the starter in the batch of beer.
I'm a lazy brewer, don't care how many billion cells are in my starter and don't think the small amount of DME will make any differenced at all to the taste of a batch of beer. I usually brew 2.5-3 gallon batches. I always try to pitch a heathy, active and fairly large amount of yeast, but I do it all by eye so I actually don't know if I'm under or over pitching. My beer usually gets going within 12 hrs, ferments clean and hits the FG I'm expecting, so if ain't broke I'm not going to do anything to fix it.Are you doing a 5 gallon batch? Do you decant? I would wonder about pitching that much starter into a 2.5 gallon brew. It might be best to decant since the wort volume itself is pretty small.
so if ain't broke I'm not going to do anything to fix it.
WY3787 and WLP530 are the Westmalle strain and Westmalle's Tripel is one of the great beers of the world. According to "Brew Like a Monk", Westmalle significantly under-pitches their yeast in order to more fully coax out the amazing flavors the yeast gives off.I am going to attempt a Tripel and will be using Wyeast 3787. I know this is supposed to be a pretty active yeast and I do 2.5 gallons batches. Should I still do a starter for an SG of 1.086?
WY3787 and WLP530 are the Westmalle strain and Westmalle's Tripel is one of the great beers of the world. According to "Brew Like a Monk", Westmalle significantly under-pitches their yeast in order to more fully coax out the amazing flavors the yeast gives off.
Per BYO..." At American microbreweries, the usual pitching rate is 1 million cells of yeast per milliliter of wort per degrees Plato....Westmalle pitches 5–6 million cells per milliliter for its 19.6 °P (1.081) Westmalle Tripel — just over 0.25 million cells/mL/°P."
Making less than a 1 liter starter is not recommended for various reasons (at least this is what I have read).
WY3787 and WLP530 are the Westmalle strain and Westmalle's Tripel is one of the great beers of the world. According to "Brew Like a Monk", Westmalle significantly under-pitches their yeast in order to more fully coax out the amazing flavors the yeast gives off.
Per BYO..." At American microbreweries, the usual pitching rate is 1 million cells of yeast per milliliter of wort per degrees Plato....Westmalle pitches 5–6 million cells per milliliter for its 19.6 °P (1.081) Westmalle Tripel — just over 0.25 million cells/mL/°P."
So for a 2.75 gallon batch in your fermenter you would need (if my calcs are correct)...
1.086 = 20.68P
ml = 2.75 * 3785 = 10,410
cells needed = 250,000/10410/20.86 = ~55 billion cells on the low end, which is about 3/4 of the smack pack depending on the age of it.
Twice, I used a similar amount for a 1.078 SG, 3 liter batch, with sugars added to the kettle and had no problem fermenting down to 1.010 and below. The beers turned out great with the targeted yeast expression coming through strongly.
Should you still do a starter? - it is always a good idea to do a starter with liquid yeast just to prove viability. A simple 1 liter starter will work just fine but if you want to hit Westmalle's pitching rates, then the approach that worked well for me with such a small batch is as follows...
Good luck
- Making less than a 1 liter starter is not recommended for various reasons (at least this is what I have read).
- So, make a 1 liter starter with the entire pack and when completed but before cold crashing,
- Suspend all the yeast and pour off a calculated percentage of the starter based on the estimated cells in the entire starter,
- Then cold crash the remaining starter and decant most of the oxidized beer prior to pitching
Do you remember where you read this?
Do you remember where you read this? I'd be interested in understanding why.
It seems like for a 2.5 gallon batch of a medium gravity ale with an expected .75 pitch rate, and assuming a 60-70% viability factor for yeast age, that a starter between .8-1L would put me just above a target pitch rate.
As with most things, you will get a lot of different answers, and as with some things, there could be more than one right answer.There is so much conflicting info about brewing Belgian styles. Some say over pitch to make sure fermentation doesn't get stuck and some say under pitch to get the right flavors. Some say the flavor isn't noticeable from underpitching. I think what I'm going to do is make a 1L starter, decant most of the wort and pitch and see what I think. It seems that temp can be a much bigger factor in the taste than whether you have over or under pitched.
There is so much conflicting info about brewing Belgian styles. Some say over pitch to make sure fermentation doesn't get stuck and some say under pitch to get the right flavors. Some say the flavor isn't noticeable from underpitching. I think what I'm going to do is make a 1L starter, decant most of the wort and pitch and see what I think. It seems that temp can be a much bigger factor in the taste than whether you have over or under pitched.
@brew_mama
How did your fermentation turn out? I ended up using a vitality starter for my 2.5G 1.072OG Dubbel. I pitched 1 full package of Omega OYL-028 into 500ml of wort (1.7ozs DME in 500ml RO water) and let it sit on a stir plate for around 5 hours until my batch was ready. OYL-028 is also the Westmalle strain so I expected fermentation to be similar to 3787.
Playing around with a few different calculators I realized that I could have done a starter, but after reading the BYO article above a few times, specifically the section which discussed the lower pitching rates at Westmalle (.25mil/mL/˚P) I calculated that one 3 month old package put me at almost exactly those rates (.24mil/mL/˚P). My batch size was also 3 gal into the fermenter which impacted the numbers a bit. I decided to go ahead and pitch at the lower rate just to see how things went.
In any case my vitality starter seems to have worked well. I had a small krausen layer (1/4") in around 8 hours and things quietly bubble away for around 24 hours before the temperature began to rise. Although, I really wanted to control the fermentation temps, the same BYO article discussed the "free rise" methods of several brewers using Westmalle so I left it alone. Temp rose from 64 to 70 over about 36 hours (In a 62 degree room) and the Krausen filled the headspace (3.5 gallon fermonster) and began bubbling through the blow off tube. If I had more headspace temps might have gone even higher, but I think the pressure may have calmed it down. After about 48 hours the activity began to quiet down slightly and the temp began to waver between 69-71. I raised the temp of my tank to 71 so that I could hold fermentation between 70-72 and after 72 hours the fermentation is now calm, but steady.
I wonder if some of the activity was due to the slight underpitching and if so, how much of that accounts for the unique Belgian flavors? No way to know..., except brew another batch with a 1L starter. Oh darn, maybe I'll have to sacrifice for the cause.
Edit: Actually I think I may have been closer to .35/mL/˚P, but Omega Yeasts are hard to pin down to estimated cell counts (I used 150b at Manufacture, but Omega estimates it could be as high as 200).
I'm sure it will. From my experience and what I have read, higher gravity Belgian ales can take 4 weeks or more to carbonate well. And then of course a few months of cool storage to condition better. My last Dubbel was 1.076 and I kept the bottles at 70˚ for 3 weeks before they even began to have noticeable carbonation, and then a few months before the flavors really started coming together.
For the last couple higher ABV beers that I bottle conditioned I added a little CBC-1
What do you mean by higher ABV?
I opened up one today and it has improved. There is some carbonation where there was none two weeks ago, but it is not where it needs to be and still tastes a little flat. Back to waiting...
What is the temperature where the bottles are stored. Higher ABV beers should take a little longer to carbonate and the temperature makes a big difference it how long it takes too. I'd be trying to keep them in the mid 70's for carbonation or maybe even a little warmer.
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