Amount of yeast for Barleywine small batch

[StevieDS]

I'm planning on brewing my first English Barleywine this week. It's going to be a very small batch 6 litres.

I'm using Danstar Nottingham yeast and my question is should I pitch the whole packet or would that be too much for such a small batch?

I know it is possible to over-pitch yeast but I don't know how much is too much.

My expected OG is 1.087.

 

[LeithR]

Hi there Stevie,
Yes, I'd pitch the whole sachet and plan to recover it after it has fermented the brew.

Good luck with it and let us know how it goes.

 

[rpt]

According to Brewer's Friend one packet isn't quite enough. You could also ask Mr Malty.

 

[StevieDS]

According to Brewer's Friend one packet isn't quite enough. You could also ask Mr Malty.

That's interesting I've never used that calculator before.
I read some of the notes below the calculator however which says it's difficult to estimate the number of yeast cells in dry yeast packets.
According to Danstar's site Nottingham yeast has ≥5 billion cells per gram which gives ≥55 billion cells in a 11g pack.
At that rate a 21 litre batch with og 1.050 would need 3 and a half packs of dry yeast!
Is this accurate, are we under-pitching every time we use dry yeast?

 

[rpt]

I normally use Mr Malty but I'd have to fire up the desktop as the site needs flash which isn't supported by the tablet. Do the two sites disagree?

 

[StevieDS]

I dunno I'm on the mobile so can't check either

 

[rpt]

Now on the desktop so have looked at Mr Malty. The calculator reckons one packet is enough. You can enter the production date to estimate the viability although dried yeast lasts much longer than liquid.