To sprinkle or Stirr Yeast when pitching? and other techniques

[tenchu_11]

I've mostly only used liquid yeast 4 batches after areating my wort I stirr my for about 3 minutes areating it a bitt. My most current batch i areated my wort and just poured the vial of liquid yeast right into the middle of the wort and let it do its work. I also saw some brewing vids on youtube and some guy was brewing and said some people like to stirr but i'm a sprinkler..i don't know why I just do it. He sprinkled yeast on the top of his wort careful to make it even all over the top and not to clump it. The one time I used dry yeast I made a small warm slurry with warm water and stirred the wort around.
Question is are all these ways of pitching/stirring yeast into a wort just prefference or would either have better effects.

Sprinkling vs Stirring...or
liquid yeast (regardless if its just a vial or a starter) straight into the wort and not stirring vs pitching liquid yeast and stirring.

Just wanting to know.

 

[Wolfy]

Me:
Rehydrate dry yeast.
Splash/swoosh/swirl (aggressively until I get bored) the covered fermenter after adding rehydrated dry or liquid yeast.

 

[tenchu_11]

I should try and sprinkle my dry yeast...wonder what sort of effect i'd get.

 

[3 Dog Brew]

I was just listening to podcast this morning about yeast hydration. The theory goes like this:

Rehydrate yeast in nutrient enriched water sprinkling on the top of the water only, do not stir or disturb. The speaker was saying that using a flat bottomed vessel like a cake pan was best because it provided more liquid surface area. The packets of dried yeast state that you will get some number X of viable yeast cells in the packet. This number assumes that you will kill off 2/3rds of them with improper rehydration techniques. Using the method described above should take about 20-30 minutes to have viable yeast, ready to pitch.

If you really want to be anal about it. Start adding small amounts of your wort to the cake pan to acclimate the yeast to their soon to be new environment. Following these practices will yield almost 5x the viable yeast cell count labeled on the packet. If my understanding is correct, the reason to not stir them is that they need to rehydrate slowly to keep the cell walls intact and submerging them in liquid only weakens them. They also need oxygen to reproduce and leaving them on the top of the liquid allows them ample oxygen to get that part of their life-cycle completed prior to putting them to work. As your initial gravity goes up this becomes more important.

 

[Wolfy]

I should try and sprinkle my dry yeast...wonder what sort of effect i'd get.

I think you'd need some sort of specific controlled scientific study to really answer that question. Some have said that you'd suffer up to 50% loss in viability, however even then, you are still pitching a huge quantity of yeast that the losses may not be noticeable unless it was in a controlled situation.

 

[NorCalAngler]

For my last couple brews that I used dry yeast I put my cooled partial boil wort into my primary bucket, sprinkled the dry yeast and then poured my top off spring water in as violently as I could without splashing to mix it all up. It worked great. This was in an IPA so I may have masked any off flavors, but the beer had great flavor and fermentation started quickly and ended where it should have.