I have a vial of White Labs WLP051 California Ale for a Black IPA I plan on brewing. If I am too lazy to create a yeast starter, can I just pitch the liquid yeast and pitch a dry yeast to handle the 1.075 OG for the Black IPA?
I would think that should be sufficient. A while back I did a 1.070 with a single pack of dry yeast and attenuated fine.
As long as you have enough healthy yeast cells, it will ferment out fine. If the two yeasts are from the same basic strain (WLP051 and US-05 for example are both “Chico” strain) then there shouldn’t be any problem with trying to balance flavor profile from the two yeast. When you attempt to use two different yeasts to get a complex fermentation profile is when you run into problems. One strain almost always dominates the fermentation and you don’t get the contribution you might expect from the second.
Make sure you rehydrate the dry yeast before pitching.
