Cell count in Omega Yeast Labs Slurry

[BrionLax]

It has been a couple of months since I have been into my LHBS and in that time they have decided to stop using White Labs yeast and are going to be carrying the Omega Yeast Labs products. I picked up a package of their Irish ale yeast but it is just about 2 months old.

Here is my issue, I am looking to over build a starter so I have yeast to use next time but I have no reference to tell me how many cells were in this slurry when it was made and therefore I can't calculate how much starter to make to get the amount I am looking for. The guy at the local shop said 140 billion cells but I didn't get the feeling he was totally sure of his answer. When I got home I looked at the Omega site and it was less than helpful as it says between slightly less that 150 billion and some will have 500 billion. I did ask the google machine but got the same line above.

Does anyone have a more specific number of cells per pack for their strains?

Cheers

 

[Comfort_Zone]

As far as I know they don't provide that information. Part of the reason is that people obsess over numbers rather than taking into account strain specific variability. They put in enough to make it practical for homebrewers. It doesn't help that cell count calculators are basically useless when you start looking at different strains. Some multiply like crazy where others only go through one or two rounds of division. I stopped worrying about that a while ago and haven't looked back since.

 

[BrionLax]

Thanks for the response. I was not worrying over the numbers just looking for a starting point to overbuild for future use.

Cheers

 

[thehaze]

I know they pack arouns 150 Billion cells, which is more than enough for 5-6 gallons up to 1.050-1.55. I personally fermented beers with 1 Omega pack and was enough for the beers I've made. Kveik strains are really agressive fermenters and I know the cell count for these does not need to be as high as some other Ale strains.

Cheers!

 

[Comfort_Zone]

I actually went to a talk given by Lance where he talked about why they decided to stop making cell count claims. Part of it is that they try to get the same number of packs from a given batch of yeast. Because the counts can vary so much depending on the strain they just don't bother. They just worry about making sure that the yeast they put in is ready to go. I'm sure you could email him but he might just tell you to not worry.

 

[TallDan]

Does anyone have a more specific number of cells per pack for their strains?

Short answer: no, nobody does, but 150B is a reasonable number to use

Longer answer: Similar to @Comfort_Zone above, I've heard Lance talk about this a couple times, and likely will again as my homebrew clubs are planning tours of Omega's facility. According to him, all cell counts are complete BS (and if you think about this some, it makes sense). Bigger yeast companies may be able to provide better approximations of cell counts in their packages, but even those have MUCH larger error margins than people like to believe. Also, yeast calculators are not nearly as accurate as we like to think they are. Again, they are just approximations of typical yeast growth. So, we have wildly inaccurate initial counts, and then use wildly inaccurate calculations to determine how many cells we have with a starter. And we use those to meet some pretty arbitrary targets for pitching rates, often not taking into account different pitching rates for specific styles or strains.

So, why bother? Well mostly because it's better than nothing. Making a starter to pitch healthy yeast helps. Making sure we come somewhere in the ballpark (or maybe just within an order of magnitude) of accepted pitching rates helps. Use the calculators (I'm partial to yeastcalculator.com ) to help you guide your process, but don't think that your beer will live or die because you're off by a few billion cells.