Quick question.. I have my starter crashing right now, I have a brew day for tomorrow. I was wondering if after I collected my runnings in the morning if I can throw this in a sauce pan and boil it on my stove. My boil in my kettle takes some time to come to a boil, so I figure I take some inside on a sauce pan I can have it boiled, crashed, and on the stir plate before I hit a boil on my brew kettle. I figure I can brew my beer, let it sit in the primary and pitch the yeast 10 hours after I start it on the plate. It should be at high krausen then. This is my first starter and I'm just trying to make sure everythings good. I already know I'm a few billion cells short of optimal pitching rate so I figure 10 ours on a step up starter will make things closer to optimal. any input? Just kinda looking for some reassurance at this point.
using runnings as a starter
- Thread starter steber
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I understand your idea but I'm not sure there is any advantage over pitching directly and there may be an advantage to the latter since one goal of having a big starter is to get the fermentation going vigorously as soon as possible after cooling to avoid contamination (the yeast outcompetes other bugs). I'm not sure what the source of your yeast is but one thing you might do to make things get going faster is to pitch your yeast into cooled runnings that have been boiled long enough to sanitize (15 min is fine) while you are boiling and cooling your big wort. That way the yeast will at least get growing actively (I'm assuming you don't have them growing at the moment) before you pitch them. That would give them a couple hours headstart since you have a long boil and cooling time for a big batch of wort.
Hope that helps.
Hope that helps.
The impression I had from your post is that you wanted to set your cooled wort aside for 10 hours while your starter was undergoing a couple of doublngs in the population. If that is correct, you would be accomplishing the same thing by just pitching directly and you would have the advantage of not having your wort sitting around with the possibility of some contaminating microorganism getting a foothold in it. I think that is unlikely but I also think you will get no advantage from growing up your yeast further in a different container, especially if you aren't going to crash them out and dump off the spent wort. Am I making sense?
If you indeed have 200 billion cells, I think you are in very good shape.
The other thing that you might want to do is freeze your runnings and keep them for growing up yeast at a later date.
If you indeed have 200 billion cells, I think you are in very good shape.
The other thing that you might want to do is freeze your runnings and keep them for growing up yeast at a later date.
