How many people make yeast starters?

[AQUILAS]

Ball park number is 1 billion cells per ml of slurry. Of course, other factors that affect viability are not factored into that but chances are that as long as you have healthy yeast that number should work.

You can estimate how much yeast you have by finding how many mL you have. Ive seen reports of density of slurry being anywhere from 1-5 billion cells/mL. Myself, I go off Wyeast's recommendation of 1.2 billion cells/mL to be conservative.

Thanks to you and desa! I'll use those numbers.

This is a question I've been seeing more and more. I think it might be worth it's own thread at this point.

There's 3 schools of thought here:

There is a method using dilution ratios, where you can estimate the cell concentration fairly accurately, but it takes time and math which makes most of us need a beer.

Many people just assume a concentration of between 1 and 4 billion cells/mL of slurry and that will get you in the rough ballpark

and finally, there's the idea that it doesn't matter what your starting cell count is when you make a starter because they will multiply to a point where there's no more oxygen and sugar in the starter, so the number of cells is decided by the volume and gravity of of your starter more than anything.

I don't think any of these are wrong, except to say that the last one needs some testing to back it up.

As a general rule, its hard to overpitch for a 5 gallon batch unless you put in a ridiculously large starter. I usually just make a 2L starter, cold crash and decant, let it warm to room temp and pitch it. I don't worry too much about pitch rate as long as its "enough." I think of it more as a threshold than an actual "ideal pitch rate".

My thinking could be totally bass-ackwards though! but it's always worked for me and I've never ended up with a slow fermentation start or a yeasty tasting beer.

Thanks for the info, King! Originally I was thinking of just tossing the yeast in, until the idea of overpitching hit my head. I've seen other say the same that it's hard to overpitch. But I'll probably just end up tossing the whole thing in.

 

[wardens355]

I use the Brewer's Friend starter calculator and make a starter every time I brew. I also grow oversized starters and store cultures of between 100-200 billion cells in mason jars in my fridge for future use.

 

[HomebrewPadawan]

You can estimate how much yeast you have by finding how many mL you have. Ive seen reports of density of slurry being anywhere from 1-5 billion cells/mL. Myself, I go off Wyeast's recommendation of 1.2 billion cells/mL to be conservative.

Ball park number is 1 billion cells per ml of slurry. Of course, other factors that affect viability are not factored into that but chances are that as long as you have healthy yeast that number should work.

I have also heard the 1-4 billion per 1 ml number, but that's a huge variance when we are talking about 50ml of yeast in the bottom of a jar either being 50, 100, 150, or 200 billion cells. I started a thread trying to figure out what factor people use when estimating their yeast count by the ml.

Here is the thread in case you want to add your opinion on it; https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=570218

It's a fun debate, but in the end, if your beer is or isn't lacking in fermentation character you can always just use the same factor you always do and pitch either more or less yeast to dial in a recipe.