Beer Forum

After I make my 2 liter starter, Im confused about the process of pitching.

1. Do you put your starter in the fridge to get all the yeast to dropout?
2. If you do the above, how do you rewarm the yeast to wort temp before pitching, or do you?
3. Isnt this a lot of stress on the yeast before pitching if you do chill it and rewarm it?

1. Yes
2. Decant at the start of brewday and leave covered til I'm ready to pitch.
3. No more-so than using a refrigerated commercial liquid yeast.

I should add that I'm doing stirplate starters, and I let the yeast go til they have eaten what is available in the starter before chilling. If you were to not be doing stirplate and only started it a day or so before brewday, I'd pitch the whole volume. I usually start mine days before I'll be using it.

crashlann wrote:After I make my 2 liter starter, Im confused about the process of pitching.

1. Do you put your starter in the fridge to get all the yeast to dropout?
2. If you do the above, how do you rewarm the yeast to wort temp before pitching, or do you?
3. Isnt this a lot of stress on the yeast before pitching if you do chill it and rewarm it?

1. Yes. I do starters 4-6 days in advance. Chill after complete.
2. Remove from fridge at very beginning of brew day. Leave covered on counter.
3. No. The changes in temp are gradual & gentle. Treat them like you treat your

1. Yes
2. Like everyone else, decant and leave out. You should try to pitch the yeast within 10 degrees of your wort. So if you are doing a lager, leaving on the counter may not be the best thing. I set my fermentation chamber to temp and leave it in there until ready to pitch.
3. No. Once pitched, you want to keep your ferment from going up and down though.

Awesome. I just got a stirplate, so I will begin my starters more than 36 hours out. Thanks a lot, this really helps.

Like the others, just a bit more detail. I use a stir plate several days in advance. At least a day before brew day I put it in the refrigerator. It separates the yeast from the spent starter wort. Remove from the refrigerator on brew day and decant off the spent wort. There will be a tiny amount of spent wort still in the flask which is needed after the wort is at pitching temperature to swirl the yeast back up in the little bit of liquid to make it easy to pitch. I decant the spent wort because it is heavily oxidized from the constant induction of oxygen from the stir plate.

One more question on the topic of yeast starters. When using Mr. Malty, if it says I need to pitch 2.19 liters of a starter, how in the hell do I do that. I have a 2 liter erlinmeyer flask. Should I make a 1 liter starter and then a separate 1.2 liter starter? So far I have been pretty much using 2 liter starters for everything, and because I do mostly Belgians and DIPAs it works, but I need to tighten this process up a bit. Thanks.

crashlann wrote:One more question on the topic of yeast starters. When using Mr. Malty, if it says I need to pitch 2.19 liters of a starter, how in the hell do I do that. I have a 2 liter erlinmeyer flask. Should I make a 1 liter starter and then a separate 1.2 liter starter? So far I have been pretty much using 2 liter starters for everything, and because I do mostly Belgians and DIPAs it works, but I need to tighten this process up a bit. Thanks.

You would need to step it up. Make a starter, ferment it out, cold crash in fridge a day or two. Decant then dump another boiled and cooled starter wort on this yeast and put back on stir plate.

Yeastcalculator.com has a great yeast calculator that allows for stepping up starters. For something like 2.19 liters, I'd just pitch a 2l starter and call it close enough rather than go through the hassle of making another starter. You'll be "underpitching" a bit according to Mr. Malty, but I don't think it would be too much of a problem.

You could also add another vial of yeast to the original starter to bump up your starting cell count.