Beer Forum

Well, I'm sure this will be interesting. At this point I probably have shocked my yeast to high heaven, and I was taken a bit off guard by the low viability estimate on my vial of yeast. I had planned on doing a starter wed for pitching today, but had underestimated the vial viability until this morning when I ran the calculator on it. I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to salvage this...Here's what I've done so far:

Went to the homebrew shop to get stuff for an all-grain saison batch. The only liquid saison strain they had was WLP-568 (saison blend) that was "best before 5/14/14", so 108 days or so old. Est 21-25% viable according to Mr. Malty or BrewersFriend. So...warmed that sucker up on Wednesday and made a 1.1L starter at about 1.025 SG. Pitched, ran it on a stirplate overnight. Put it in the fridge around noon Thursday. Removed from fridge 10am today, made a second 550ml 1.040 starter and chilled so that the new wort and old slurry were at a similar temp. Added that to 500ml of decanted, loose yeast slurry from the first starter (est. combined gravity to be about 1.022). Set that on a stirplate around 11am in a room about 72F.

The calcs say I should have somewhere between 75-100 million cells per ml per degree plato.

The plan is to let it warm up and do its thing on the stirplate, and pitch it tonight (probably done brewing around 10pm). The alternative is to wait and brew tomorrow morning, and pitch at about 9am.

Suggestions? Anyone have thoughts about what I should do?

sexychicken wrote:Well, I'm sure this will be interesting. At this point I probably have shocked my yeast to high heaven, and I was taken a bit off guard by the low viability estimate on my vial of yeast. I had planned on doing a starter wed for pitching today, but had underestimated the vial viability until this morning when I ran the calculator on it. I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to salvage this...Here's what I've done so far:

Went to the homebrew shop to get stuff for an all-grain saison batch. The only liquid saison strain they had was WLP-568 (saison blend) that was "best before 5/14/14", so 108 days or so old. Est 21-25% viable according to Mr. Malty or BrewersFriend. So...warmed that sucker up on Wednesday and made a 1.1L starter at about 1.025 SG. Pitched, ran it on a stirplate overnight. Put it in the fridge around noon Thursday. Removed from fridge 10am today, made a second 550ml 1.040 starter and chilled so that the new wort and old slurry were at a similar temp. Added that to 500ml of decanted, loose yeast slurry from the first starter (est. combined gravity to be about 1.022). Set that on a stirplate around 11am in a room about 72F.

The calcs say I should have somewhere between 75-100 million cells per ml per degree plato.

The plan is to let it warm up and do its thing on the stirplate, and pitch it tonight (probably done brewing around 10pm). The alternative is to wait and brew tomorrow morning, and pitch at about 9am.

Suggestions? Anyone have thoughts about what I should do?

Are u making 1.1liter starters because you have a smaller Erlenmeyer flask?
I let my Sachro starters run atleast 3-4 days to maximize growth, it seems like your stopping it before full growth. Are u committed to brewing tomorrow? What is your goal pitching rate? Please tell us what you OG/FG goals are and more about the recipe.

Yeah, you definitely need to let those starters run longer, especially when you assume that they're not doing so well. I highly doubt viability was that low though. If it were, you had the right idea at first - a ~1L low gravity starter, but you should've let it run it's course before crashing/decanting. Then step it up to a regular gravity starter ~2L & let it finish up. Depending on the gravity, I would've probably done a 3rd starter with it (>1.060) at 1.040 ~3-4L. Crashing your starters before they have a chance to finish up is asking for problems.

Ozwald wrote:Yeah, you definitely need to let those starters run longer, especially when you assume that they're not doing so well.

+1000

Even though "healthy" yeast cells can bud and form new daughter cells in 95 minutes, you still need to think of a starter as a form of fermentation. For a starter you're essentially propagating yeast but you will still have a 10-20 hour Lag Phase in a starter before you're even actually creating new yeast cells. Not to mention you were under the assumption that a lot of the cells were unhealthy so this phase could take even longer. After that phase is the Log Phase which can last for 48-60 hours under healthy yeast conditions. So I'm not sure the 12-16 hour starter you did actually did anything but built up some sterols in the viable population of vial.

If you're doing a traditional sessionable 3-5% Saison I think you're fine (certainly not ideal) but 6% and above you're kind of gambling with an already finicky yeast strain.