Yeast starter overflow

[Martybhoy]

I'm doing a 2 stage starter. 1st stage went as normal. 2nd stage has shed loads of krausen. It has started escaping so I have put a towel round it, to protect my stir plate.

Question is, why so much krausen on the 2nd stage? Both stages were 2 litres.

Is this normal?

 

[MyQul]

How much yeast did you pitch in the first 2L. The probably reason is because the first 2L would have contained a lot of yeast anyway, enough to ferment 23L of beer. You then put it all into another 2L of wort so would have grown a hell of a lot more yeast, so overflowed the flask

 

[Martybhoy]

1st starter had 41bn cells. In a 2ltr starter this would result in around 329bn cells.

I decanted almost all the wort, and added another 2ltrs of water and DME. This should get me around 587bn cells.

I planned to split the resulting yeast in two. One for my brew on Sunday (Pliny the Elder attempt), and one for a rainy day.