Over-pitching yeast?

[whip]

So being new to all-grain brewing and preferring heavier beers I began making yeast starters. I plug the numbers into BeerSmith2 and it tells me how many yeast cells I should be pitching. So I put it on the stir plate and away it goes. But realistically, I can't tell how many yeast cells I'm developing in my starter.

Now we all know that under-pitching your beer can be a bad thing. But, I was wondering, is it possible to over-pitch?

 

[FirstAidBrewing]

Yes, but IMO it is harder to overpitch than underpitch.

It really needs to be a really large amount where it would impact the standard life cycle of the yeast, which is hard to do.

 

[Subdivisions]

Use a calculator such as this one to figure out your yeast count.

http://www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitch-rate-and-starter-calculator/

If you're making a starter it's unlikely that you'll ramp it up so much as to severely over pitch, especially on the bigger beers you're doing.

 

[RM-MN]

Nobody really knows how many yeast cells are in a sample. If you look at the methods use to count you will see that there can be a huge difference depending on the location within the sample where the count took place and then that result is extrapolated so far as to be ridiculous. With that in mind, your pitch rate isn't very critical. It takes a very low count to underpitch enough to be noticed and a very large overpitch. Take a look at this experiment with pitch rate, noticing that the underpitch was about 1/8th the recommended amount and the overpitch was about 5 times the recommended amount and in each case the beer was quite drinkable. http://sciencebrewer.com/2012/03/02/pitching-rate-experiment-part-deux-results/

 

[whip]

As always, thank you all very much for sharing your knowledge.

RM-MN - That was an extremely interesting article and I really enjoyed reading it.