Lallemand New England - intentional under-pitch?

[RustyHorn]

This yeast has confused me a lot, raising various questions (covered in a different thread). The pitch rate is 1g per litre which was confirmed in an email to one of their technical team. Now, 1g per litre gives a minimum of 1 billion cells per gram. The beer I'm making is 12.5 litres with an OG of 1.078.
Cells needed, according to various calculators, is 236 billion. The suggested pitch falls magnificently short of this at 12.5 billion. This yeast is also known to have a lag time of 24/36 hours and gives off fruity, stone fruit flavours. Is the under-pitch an intentional part of this yeast's design to form those flavours? It also has an alcohol tolerance of just 9% ABV which might suggest weaker yeast due to being stressed out because of the under-pitch. I could be very wrong here, but I'm trying to understand it all a bit more. Any thoughts would be welcome (other than... "but you'll get beer" - that's never helpful).

 

[Northern_Brewer]

You have to remember that their standard process gives >5bn per gram, and it seems they're only quoting >1bn/g to cover themselves because they've got some problems with inconsistent viability. So I'd look at it as a probable-5bn/g rather than a definite-1bn/g.

But you've reduced your viability further by going for a repacked version rather than an official Lallemand product, sojust as a guess I'd use 50% more over what the email said to account for that.

Yes, underpitching is a thing with Conan to get it expressing more esters.

Worth noting what TYB say about WLP4000 :
"In order to achieve high attenuation, we recommend fermenting at 64-68 ºF for 5-7 days, and then raising the temperature to 70 ºF until a stable gravity is reached. We also recommend mashing at 148-149 ºF and adding a small percentage of the fermentables (~ 5-10%) as sugar.

Attenuation has also been reported to increase towards the higher end of the listed range when repitching after the first generation."

 

[RustyHorn]

You have to remember that their standard process gives >5bn per gram, and it seems they're only quoting >1bn/g to cover themselves because they've got some problems with inconsistent viability. So I'd look at it as a probable-5bn/g rather

It's all so confusing! Everyone has different ideas on cell counts so there's nothing definitive.
Also, thanks for the advice. I'll definitely over-pitch.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Welcome to the bleeding edge of biology.

It's easy to forget just how hard yeast suppliers work to give us a consistent product most of the time - this kind of weirdness with a yeast showing random variations in viability is much closer to my experience in "real" biology...