First time 2 stage yeast starter

[brewguyver]

Confused

Which part? I'll try to use a metaphor since i'm not sure where i lost you.

On the stepping up concept, think of it this way. Say your flask is the state of Rhode Island. You're trying to get your population up to that of the whole northeast.

First off, it'll be hard to fit the entire population of NY, Philly, Boston, and everything in between into the tiny state of Rhode Island.

Secondly, you mention giving your population their food in 1/2 or 1/3 portions (e.g. Slitting your 2.3 liters of starter wort and dosing your 1L flask 3 times). Eventually your population would be too big to survive on the split portion of food, and they'd either stop growing or would starve.

What I'm getting at here Is that you really need a bigger container.

Continuing the metaphor though another option would be to split up your starter. So if we took your first step is about the size of the state of Rhode Island and put that into three equally sized states today with 1/3 the population, you can grow each of them up significantly without being too overcrowded without giving them too little food.

 

[jesseroberge]

Thanks for the info, if I get a 5 leter flask I could Do a one step only and not habe the hastle of splitting Right ?

 

[brewguyver]

Thanks for the info, if I get a 5 leter flask I could Do a one step only and not habe the hastle of splitting Right ?

Yep. And if you want to do a step from a 1L to a 5L, that's pretty easy too.

If I find a good way to use a glass gallon jug on a stir plate, I'll let you know

 

[kh54s10]

Look at yeastcalc.com about doing a stepped starter. Hover over any field and it will give information. There is also a calculator to tell you how much dme to use.

A step starter allows you to use a smaller flask so that you don't have to spend big $$ on a big flask.

It is really not that difficult. Just takes more time. I start from 5ml vials of frozen yeast.

In Yeastcalc it will tell you at the the needed cell count then you can change the sizes of each step until the cell count at the final step contains the right count.

The major mistake in the initial post was to decant after only a few hours. You want the yeast to settle out of suspension so that the "beer" on top is very clear. Chilling is the best way to accomplish this. If it is still cloudy that is yeast in suspension. And a lot of yeast, remember a clear beer still has enough yeast in suspension to bottle condition the beer.

The 1:10 ratio is constant if you want a starter wort between 1.038 and 1.040. I make my first step a little light. I saw someone state that pitching at high krausen does not let the cells reproduce fully. I disagree. They are mostly done reproducing and are then primarily working at fermenting the beer. I still decant if my starter is larger that a liter since I don't want to add that liquid to my beer.