Yeast clustering in starter

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jas0420

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Ever had yeast cluster together in a stir plate starter??? I have 4 flasks going with WLP005 British Ale, all on stir plates, all started and stepped up with clear wort. All 4 flasks look like the pic attached. It is like a tornado of yeast.

I thought the visible material might have been solids from the wort, but under a microscope they are definitely, 100% certain, little clusters of yeast. I need 971B cells for this brew and visibly it looks like about 10X that. If I turn off the stir plates they all settle out very fast. If I take a sample and try to count them, there's almost nothing showing up on the hemocytometer, so I'm not getting a good representation of the actual cell count in my mind.

I haven't had starters do this before........ These are growing in a room that is ~ 71 degrees F and have been on stir plates from the start. I usually make a little extra starter than BeerSmith calls for, do a count, and downwardly adjust the volume I actually use based on said counts. I made about 12L, need about 10.3L in a perfect BeerSmith world.... Just looks like a LOT of yeast and I'm not sure at this point how to get an accurate count since my samples (seemingly) aren't very homogenous (even though I took samples from a flask while it was still stirring).

Currently planning to crash cool, and use about 5/6'th of the resulting slurry....
 

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english ale yeast flocculates to an absurd degree. The starters look like chunks of yogurt spinning around in wort. This is totally normal. It can make cell counting difficult. Personally I wouldnt get too hung up on numbers. You will be fine
 
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