Another Stupid Question About Yeast

[Joeyriles]

Hello,

I've cultivated up this amount of yeast from starters and I would like to check if this would be the right amount for a 23 litre batch? I'm brewing on Monday so have time to make another starter if need be.

 

[MyQul]

Have you got another jar exactly the same. If you have carefully put exactly the same amount of water in the second jar as you have yeast then measure how much water you have. Ideally you want about 166ml to give you 200billion cells

I'm in a similar situation to you in that I will be pitching my yeast that I cultured up (from one of my own bottles) on monday. I think I've got enough yeast but just to make sure I'm going to add it to 1L of starter wort and pitch it at high krausen. It's more important to pitch healthy yeast than 'more' yeast, and yeast at high krausen is at it's healthiest. I've done this before and it goes crazy in a really short lag time (about 6 hours iirc)

 

[Joeyriles]

Cheers MyQul, all done. We'll see how it progresses

 

[Joeyriles]

This is already climbing out of the jar! Decanted to a sterilised DJ

 

[MyQul]

So how did yours go then?

Mine,I took it out the fridge last night to warm to room temp this morn and put it into a DJ of 1L starter with a blow off tube attached as this yeast throws a huge krausen. I was amazed to hear the blow off tube (which the other end was in a jar of boiled and cooled water ) 'plopping' after only ten minutes. 3 hours later and the krausen was begining to grow.
When I got back from work the krausen was about 2inches away from the top of the DJ. I've now pitched the whole lot into my wort and expect it to be quite lively so have attached the blow of rig/yeast harvesting jar to the FV

 

[Joeyriles]

I'd say it's pretty viable.

 

[steveshep8676]

I know it's not ideal for everyone but I bought a microscope and use a hemocytometer to do either a long or short count of active yeast cells. This takes out any guess work and gives a good accurate yeast yeast cell count also showing the yeast viability. It's not difficult to do but obviously it comes at a cost but the benefits are huge. When making and pitching a starter you need to know how many cells there are per ml and also the amount that are active (viability)