Excellent!
But why aren't you making 2 liter starters?
Interesting you should ask that. I kinda, sorta, am.
I had a revelation of sorts--you may or may not agree--that suggested I should get that second liter not in the Ehrlenmeyer flask, but in the fermenter.
What I do is this: I do a normal starter, add a pinch of yeast nutrient; I oxygenate the starter wort--which I've only known one other HBT'er to do--and get it going on the stir plate.
I've found that the yeast at about 14 hours is really going strong; at 18 hours or so, it's winding down. So I try to time things so I pitch that starter at 14-15 hours. That's right--the whole thing in the fermenter, all 1-liter of it. Drops the OG about a point.
I'm not crashing the starter in a fridge, I'm not decanting the "beer" off the starter--the whole thing, right in.
I do this with lagers too--where the advice is to have a 2-liter starter almost always. But I have a starter at about 70 degrees, I chill the wort to 70 degrees, I pitch the whole thing, and I'll wait about 5 hours before starting to drop the temp to 50 degrees. In the meantime, by the time the temp gets low, I've increased that cell count significantly. So the effect is to have a 2-liter starter but only do one liter.
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I'll wait for the incredulous responses questioning my manhood and intelligence. But it works. If you want someone other than me to say it's OK, you can read about this approach in the White/Zainasheff
Yeast book on pages 134 and 138.
BTW, here's why I started to oxygenate the starter wort. I've been doing Low Oxygen brewing lately, and one of the things one is supposed to do is to boil the strike water for 5 minutes before cooling it to strike temps. The boiling drives off the oxygen from the water, leaving little to oxidize the wort in the mash.
So it got me to thinking--if we're boiling a starter, aren't we also driving off the oxygen from there? And don't yeast need oxygen to develop cell walls? And thus shouldn't it be better to oxygenate that starter wort to give those yeasties the best environment in which to double, and then the stir plate continues the admission of oxygen to the flask? For me all the above are answered "yes."
I posted about this a while back, and you'd thought I'd insulted the Pope or something. People were adamant that oxygen got into the starter wort as it diffused past the foil cap on the flask. But I can't believe that is either a complete or fast process, especially as yeast are expelling CO2 as part of their efforts. I suspect much of the response was due to having another potential thing to have to do in making a starter. Whatever.
Only later did I find White/Zainasheff discussing this on page 134 of their book.
