Vitality starter for dry lager yeast?

[artichoke]

Does anyone have experience making vitality starters for dry yeast?

I have 2 packages of 34/70 dry yeast, which I want to use up to cold ferment 24 L of a 1.050 lager wort at 10C. While technically those packets have enough yeast to ferment out the beer (eventually), it would be under-pitching a bit and I am concerned about a long lag time leading to non-optimal results and would like to tighten it up. I don't want to buy more yeast packets at this time (hard to get to the HBS these days), although I realize this would be the easy solution.

A vitality starter seems like it would be a good way to speed up the lag time. However, there doesn't seem to be much if any info on making lager vitality starters out of dry yeast. For those who have experience doing this, can you please describe your process?

Thanks.

- AC

 

[cswis86]

I've never made a starter with dry yeast but I rehydrate dry yeast in about a cup of boiled/cooled water for about 15 minutes prior to pitching. I've made a few lagers with 34/70 this way pitching 2 packs like you're going to and have had good results. I typically see some activity within 24 hours when fermenting at 50F/10C and peak krausen at about 48-72 hours.

 

[stickyfinger]

i made a starter of us-05 a month or two ago. never made a starter before with dry yeast. the yeast was a beast in the final beer and i saved half of the starter for a future pitch. i don't see an issue with making a starter if you want a faster start or to grow up more yeast and wake them up. i know people say it's stupid to make a starter with dry yeast, but it worked amazingly well for me.

 

[CascadesBrewer]

I would pitch the two packs. That should be just about a perfect pitch rate for your batch. What calculator is saying that is an underpitch?

I have wondered about the value of a vitality starter for dry yeast. I do use a similar method for liquid yeast, I feel that much of the benefit is that it gives the yeast a chance to absorb oxygen, and build up their cell structure to get ready to reproduce. In theory dry yeast are already at that state.

 

[day_trippr]

At a lager pitch rate of 1.5M/ml/°P two fresh packs of 34/70 would be just shy of the 443B cells needed for the batch size and OG.
If one feels the need to bump up the pitch, don't put both packs in a starter, because the growth rate will be very low and very nearly result in unity gain (ie: no gain). Do a starter with one pack, let it ferment out, crash it, and on brew day decant the starter and pitch it with the other pack...

Cheers!

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

i made a starter of us-05 a month or two ago. never made a starter before with dry yeast. the yeast was a beast in the final beer and i saved half of the starter for a future pitch. i don't see an issue with making a starter if you want a faster start or to grow up more yeast and wake them up. i know people say it's stupid to make a starter with dry yeast, but it worked amazingly well for me.

US-05 is known to be both a clean yeast and a slower working yeast - there's a graph in Fermentis's "Tips and Tricks" brochure that shows typical times to reach FG for many of their strains of dry yeast (link and page number reference available upon request).

People seem to be concerned about this slow start - often associating the slow start with 1) a greater contamination risk (but how much greater is never mentioned) or 2) concerns about sub-optimal results (but once again, without mentioning how this will the impact the beer).

Anecdotally, having pitched US-05 in a lot of batches, I get good results pitching it dry. For me, the slower startups don't result in contaminated beer or undesired flavors. So I currently don't have a need to make starters with dry yeast.

That being said, I find these discussions interesting and some people seem to have good reasons for making a starter with dry yeast.

 

[stickyfinger]

yeah mostly i wanted to harvest more yeast.

 

[artichoke]

If one feels the need to bump up the pitch, don't put both packs in a starter, because the growth rate will be very low and very nearly result in unity gain (ie: no gain). Do a starter with one pack, let it ferment out, crash it, and on brew day decant the starter and pitch it with the other pack...

Cheers!

Great point, thanks.

 

[ebbelwoi]

https://fermentis.com/en/tips-n-tricks/for-you-brewers/

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

https://fermentis.com/en/tips-n-tricks/for-you-brewers/

Also some additional information here Answers about yeast and fermentation and (last time I looked back in Oct 2019) in their mobile app.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

More information if one follows some of the links here: Active Dry Yeast