7.27 Liter yeast starter????!!I

I used this yeast starter calculator (http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html) for a very high OG (1.100) Belgian Quad recipe I have and it told me for my 5.20 gallon batch I need to make a starter that is 2.93 liters if I use two vials or 7.27 liters if I use one vial!

Is this correct? How big can a starter be (in liters starter / gallon wort) before it dilutes/changes the flavor of the beer?

 

That may be right for one vial, however, you can go to yeastcalc.com or brewersfriend.com (go to their calculator section) and you can do a step starter. This is where you could use one vial, or even two if you wanted and you just make two starters. Make one, wait until it's done, cold crash, decant, and then throw more starter wort in there and let it go again. Most people don't reallt go over 2 liters and decant the liquid off to prevent the starter from impacting the flavor of the beer. If you can't cold crash you should still decant, you are just potentially pouring off a bit of the yeast.

 

According to http://www.yeastcalc.com/, a starter of 2L will yield you 377B cells from a stir plate.

 

If you need a 7 liter starter, you can probably get the same cell count making a 1.5 L starter then stepping up to 3 L starter. Play with yeastcalc to get more exact numbers.

 

Everything posted above is dead on, and I can't add much about starter size. However, another way to get to appropriate pitching rates is to re-pitch. If I'm making a really big beer, like your quad, I try to make a lower gravity batch first, and harvest the yeast from it. Then I brew the high gravity beer within a few days, and pitch my harvested slurry. That way, I'm not dealing with crazy starter sizes or repeated steps up.

Mrmalty.com talks about pitching slurry, and there's a 'Yeast washing illustrated' sticky thread here that will help you get started if you choose this route.

 

Your time is better spent brewing a normal gravity beer with the yeast and repitching the slurry into the high O.G. batch.

 

Get a stir plate. You can make a much smaller starter that way and still have a high cell count.

 

I made a big, two step starter for a somewhat high gravity lager.

It was about that same size, slightly bigger, actually. I just cold crashed it for a couple days then decanted off the liquid - all but what was needed to swirl up the yeast cake into a slurry and pour it out.

 

On this case I used Brewer's Friend calculator. It's easy to do multi step starters on that one.

Using the Pro Brewer 1.0 pitch rate, a two stage starter (shaking method) gets you very, very close to target pitch rate with a 1.5L first stage and 3L second stage.

 

I'd disagree with that...unless you already have one in the hopper that's pretty much done.

You can do a two stage yeast starter in 3-4 days, maybe less. Making a beer just to reuse the yeast cake is two - three weeks, at least.

 

Man...I used a 20L brown ale starter for my 1.127 barleywine,

 

20L is about 5 gallons.....

 

I think it is ok at 5%, but around 10% of the volume it begins to impact, but I don't recall exactly. 20% volume is to much.

A 7L starter is almost 2 gallons. BUT if you decant, while the starter is 7L, let it sit for a few days, and the yeast will drop, and then you can pour off like 6L of liquid and mix the rest of the slurry back up and put in the yeast.

Or get a stir plate.

 

Exactly....I know you can figure it out.


Hint: I bottled and drank the starter...

 

Thanks for all the replies!

I just bought a stir plate! It has brought my necessary starter size down to 2.69. My question now is, how much water do I add to my starter boil? I know that 100 grams DME per liter is what I want to go for, but considering boil off, etc, just how much water do I put in my yeast starter boil? Also, even if I wasn't accounting for boil off, I'd need to know the density of DME to subtract the volume of my 269 grams from 2.69 liters.

Do you see what I mean?

 

Boil off is small. The only purpose of the boil is to kill nasty's and dissolve the DME, hence why it is for only 15 minutes. The shape of the flask tends to condense the steam on the walls, going back in.

 

I only boil for 5 minutes and that's been fine.

 

It's not that big of a deal necessary to account for the minutiae of detail. You're just growing yeast...