is there enough yeast in my starter?

[thesalmon]

yesterday i made a starter yeast from some yeast i recycled. i followed instructions that i found on this forum to wash yeast from my primary fermentor. i have 1 liter starter with about 100g dme that has started fermenting so it seems to be all ok but im just not sure if it enough yeast?
its a white lab bavarian hefeweizen yeast from a weiss beer

any advice would be great

 

[Ticebain]

If it has started fermenting then pitch it. Even if you got mostly sludge when you washed your last batch there is still likely a ton of yeast in the starter now. As long as your new wort is not too high gravity it will likely take right off and start chugging along within 12 hours. If nothing by 24 hours then maybe your washing was not good quality.

If it has not started in 24 hours warm you carboy up a few degrees. If it still has not started 24 hours later them you need to pitch fresh yeast in a hurry as you are now in the danger zone (maybe even too late)

In which case, congrats. You are now making a sour!!

 

[greatschmaltez]

If your starter is fermenting within 24 hours you should be fine. Typically when you wash yeast you get like 300-400 billion cells at least, so my guess is you got plenty. I will typically split my wash into 2 jars and make a batch with each. I would not ferment warm with this particular yeast, go like 63-62 in my opinion.

 

[thesalmon]

yeah the started got going within 10 hours il make up the wort in the morning and pitch away so,

thanks a lot

 

[sweetcell]

it's almost impossible to know at this point how much yeast you have in there, without doing lab work. we might be able to develop an estimate if you can answer the following: how much slurry did you add to the starter? how old was it? how "pure" was the slurry, vs. liquid or other junk like hops, etc?

for now i'd pitch what you have. chances are it'll be enough, or close enough.

next time, consider using a tool like http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html to figure out how much slurry to use, or how many cells are in the slurry & how big a starter is required. www.yeastcalc.com is also useful.

 

[flars]

The amount of yeast harvested can be quite variable. It begins with if all the available yeast was brought into the rinsing process. How many steps there were in the rinsing. How much yeast may have been lost in each step.

There will be less yeast lost in each step if several days of cold crashing was allowed for the yeast to settle out before each harvest container was decanted.

Without details of all these steps it comes down to a estimate. What size was your final container? How liquid or thick was yeast in the container?

When I rinse yeast, in the final step, I estimate 1 billion cells per miililiter if the yeast will pour like a thick sauce, without swirling extra liquid into it.

I'll then use Yeastcalc to determine how many cells I need for the new beer and what size starter to make.