Greetings! Our club is brewing an English Barleywine this Saturday. We forgot to order the yeast packets so we’re going to use my cropped 1056. I have two jars of yeast and each have a 200 mL yeast cake. The last harvest date was 10/11/12. The barleywine is a 5 gallon batch and will have a OG of 1.117. Mr Malty’s calculator says I need about 1800 mL of yeast but this calculator doesn’t do step starters. I like the yeastcalc.com calculator but I’m not sure if it does yeast slurries? It looks like it’s setup for fresh yeast. Is there a calculator that does both slurries and step starters? Right now, I’m planning on doing a 3 step starter. Step 1 would be 1L, two is 1.25L and three would be 2L.
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Mark
I don’t think a 2l starter would be enough.
I would do a 1l and then a 1 gallon.
I’m actually doing a 4+ liter starter. It’s three steps…1L, 1.25L, 2L.
Mark
Your slurry should be close to 31% viable. It could easily be done with a two step starter. Starting with 110ml of Thick Yeast, step one 1.25L, step two 2.5L starter. Using intermittent shaking you should end up with approx. 429B cells. If you have a stir plate your steps could be smaller.
Baritone Brewer, thanks for the reply. How did you come up with 31% viability? I entered 10/11/12 in mrmalty and it comes up with 10%. I’m interested in how you came up with your cell count as well. Thanks!
Mark
[quote=“merfizle”]I’m actually doing a 4+ liter starter. It’s three steps…1L, 1.25L, 2L.
Mark[/quote]
Looks like you are doing a 2l starter.
If you pitch the maximum cell count for the size/OG of the starter there will be no cell growth.
If you pitch consecutively into 1l starter 15 times, you did not do a 15l starter. You did a 1l starter.
A better idea is to make a .5l starter. Pitch that to a 2l starter. Pitch that to a 5g 1.040-.050 beer (Mild/ESB). Then pitch your barlywine directly onto the yeast cake.
You are way past being ready for a barlywine brew day on this Saturday.
Nighthawk, I agree. There’s a good post on Homebrewtalk on how to calculate starter size needed using a slurry at various viability percentages. Based on that we would need a 4L starter by Saturday. So, we will be getting fresh ale yeast from a local brewery instead. Thanks for the help.
[quote=“merfizle”]Baritone Brewer, thanks for the reply. How did you come up with 31% viability? I entered 10/11/12 in mrmalty and it comes up with 10%. I’m interested in how you came up with your cell count as well. Thanks!
Mark[/quote]
Don’t use the “calulate viability by date” option when dealing with slurry. For the average homebrewer, your yeast has roughly 80% viability at harvest time. You need to take into account for a 25% viability loss per month after that. Therefore you would see 60% @ 1 month, 45% @ 2months, 33.75% @ 3month. etc.
Starting with 110ml of Thick Yeast from that harvest date you would be starting with a little over 105B cells viable cells. With intermittent shaking the 105B cells pitched into a 1.25L starter would bring you to approx 212B cells. With the second step being a 2.5L starter that would bring you to approx 434B cells.
Keep in mind that when stepping in this fashion you would be cold crashing and decanting between steps.
