I have a 1272 wyeast II that is dated april 13 it is now august 18. I made a starter last night to brew a cascade mountain west coast imperial ipa. I didn’t see any activity for about 12 hours. It looks like it fermenting pretty good now. I have it on a stir plate. this is an extract kit and should have a og of 1.086. so my question is this since the yeast is about 4 month old should I decant and build up the yeast or do you guys think it will be ok to go with just the starter I have now. I was worried that being four months old that I wouldn’t have enough strong yeast to finish the 1.086 og . I need some help on this question.
Leave out the 2 pounds of sugar on brewday and come up a little shy of 5 gallons in fermenter. Pitch the yeast you have once that starts to die down a few days later boil a bit of water along with the sugar
cool and dump in fermenter. The initial pitch will serve as huge starter
so your saying I don’t need to put my flask in frig. and let yeast settle out. decant then make another starter. if I do it the way you said is it going to change the flavor.
According to YeastCalc you need 308 billion cells for a 1.086 brew of 5.25 gallons. Your yeast viability is at 34%. One 1.5 liter starter wiith a second 1.5 liter step-up starter wil give you 344 billion cells. Chill your first starter to get the yeast to settle and decant. Warm this starter back to room temperature and then make your step-up starter. Your entire starter at this point could be pitched. If you have the time, chill and decant most of the wort. Leave enough wort to swirl the yeast into for pitching.
http://yeastcalc.com/Put it in the frig and decant then pitch what you have. By adding the sugar after you wont have to step it up because the initial fermentation will do the same thing a starter would. Youll have a ton of yeast that will look at the simple sugar as dessert.
thanks for the input
How big is your initial starter?
my initial was 2000 ml per nb’s directions I boiled 1300 ml. with 1 cup of dme.
thanks again for all the help
That seems like a pretty large boil off, so maybe the slow start was do to a higher gravity on the starter. Also, I would recommend in the future measuring DME by weight not volume. 10 g per 100 ml. So for a 2000 L starting you would want 200g of DME. I only boil for 5 minutes so I don’t get much of a boil off.
:cheers:
What’d you end up doing?
beerme11 it’s in the fridge right now. still undecided which way I am going to proceed. going to do something because I want to brew with it this weekend.
Based on the Mr Malty/YeastCalc info, your starter is extremely small. I bet your beer will turn out fine.
