og for yeast starter

[dharvey]

i'm making a tripel with an og of 1.07. i read--i think somewhere on here--that your starter should be about +/- .01 from your og. i made a 1.5L 1.065 starter in my 2L flask and put it on a stirplate, you can guess what happened. after cleaning my desk, i cold crashed the starter. still looks good, but is this correct, in terms of the yeast starter's og? i can't find any info about this.

 

[LLBeanJ]

1.040 should be the wort gravity for starters. 1.020 on the first step if trying to revive an old or small culture. The idea is to grow the colony without stressing the little buggers.

 

[Gavin C]

The sweet spot for a starter OG is ~1.040 (10 plato)

This can result in maximal yeast growth per gram of DME used assuming all other desired variables are optimized.

Any less and your starter needs to be unnesecarily large

Any higher and you don't get any more bang for your buck

• No greater yeast biomass produced
• Greater potential stress on the yeast from the higher gravity wort

Here is Braukaiser's data covering this

ETA: This does not exclude starters of lower gravity for the reasons that @LLBeanJ correctly points out.