Bottle Yeast Harvest Starter Question

[SGTSparty]

Hey all. Its my first time doing a bottle harvest (from Bell's Oberon) and its only my 2nd time doing a starter so I was hoping for a little advice. I made a 1 liter starter using a 1/2 lb of light DME on Tuesday. Took 1/4 of it and pitched the dregs of 4 bottles and put it on the stir plate. Then Thursday I took the other 3/4 of the starter that I'd covered and stashed in the fridge, brought it up to room temp while i cold crashed the mini-starter. Once I the main starter was up to temp I decanted the mini-starter and pitched the slurry into the main starter and popped it back on the stir plate. Its now Saturday morning and this is what my starter looks like on the stir plate:

Does this look right? I don't have any krausen but again, only my 2nd time doing this (first was just a 2 day starter with a smack pack to test out the stir plate, that one never had any krausen either) so I don't really know what I'm suppose to be looking for.

thanks

 

[IslandLizard]

After you crashed your first step, how much slurry was there on the bottom, roughly? That's an indication of the yeast being viable enough and propagating.

There really is no need to crash the small first step (or steps), just adding the 3/4 liters to the flask would have been be fine. Moreover, if the cold crash isn't complete, it takes anywhere between 12 and 48 hours depending on the yeast, you'd be decanting a lot of good viable and active cells.

Relax, your starter is good and cloudy, so there's yeast in there. Foam/krausen is actually an unwanted side effect, you want to grow yeast, not ferment wort.

 

[SGTSparty]

Thanks for the reassurance. There was maybe 1/8" in the bottom of a mason jar slurry wise? Not sure. Do you think I should step it up again before I brew? I thought cloudy was good but I've seen references to krausen in starters on the board and didn't know what to expect

 

[DangerisBrewing]

I'm concerned about the amount of DME you used. That sounds like a lot of SG for a starter.
The suggested amount for a starter is 10g DME per 100ml. So for a 1 Litre starter you need 100g. This gives you about 1.040.
Another tip I recently learned was using half that to create a mini starter to harvest yeast from the dregs of a bottle. So 5g per 100ml.
I followed these steps and had great success.
PS. If you have a refractometer you can check the SG to see how the yeast is performing.

Cheers

 

[SGTSparty]

I don't have a refractometer unfortunately. I used that ratio because I saw something similar here: http://www.eckraus.com/blog/harvest-yeast-from-commercial-beer so I figured 4 cups is about a liter and 400g is like 14 oz and I had 1/2 lb if DME so that should be close enough to the ratio but I could make a larger batch once and split it

 

[Calder]

1.090 is really high for a starter. Mine are normally 1.035, and when I'm trying to get bottle dregs going, I usually start with a small starter about 1.020.

I think I'd put some sanitized water (cooled boiled water) in that starter, to double the volume and lower the OG.

I've found the health of bottle dregs is varied. I've had some start in a day, while others have taken a week to get going.