I know that it is not recommended to make a starter for dry yeasts because of the large numbers of yeast in comparison to the starter itself. I feel like I have done similar but with liquid yeast? I recently made a 1 gallon starter and pitched a single vial of WL bavarian hefe, I then made an additional 1 gallon starter and pitched the slurry onto it. I would have been set with the roughly 850 billion yeast cells this created but then decided to brew 37 gallons instead of 27, so I made an additional 1+ gallon starter in order to get to roughly 1200+ cells. So my question. Am I freaking these yeast out by throwing basically 9 WL vials into a 1 gallon starter? For reference, with each stage I use pure O2 at start, along with yeast nutrient, all on a stir plate. Normally, this is not my process. Usually I will do a 1 gallon, followed by at most an additional 1 gallon and then into a 5 gallon batch in order to create the necessary yeast for my 40 gallon or so batches. What do you yeast GURU’s think about the health of the resultant yeast?
The yeast don’t know what you’re doing, they just see food and eat. If you’re putting the equivalent of nine vials into one gallon, they’re not going to do a lot of reproducing before all the food is gone, though.
I say 9 vials because after the second starter there were roughly 850 billion yeast I threw into the last starter. By Mr Malty standards that’s about 9 ultra fresh vials. And you are right, I don’t get a whole lot more growth. It goes from 850 to a little under 1300 billion, but it is the difference between pitching 70% of the yeast I should or 100%. I know some people purposefully underpitch bavarian hefe’s, at which point the 70% would have been fine, but I didn’t want to. I am following the recipe off of the “Great Bavarian Weisbier project” page.
