Pitching 1liter starter in 5 gallon batch.

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blkandrust

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I have been making a liter starter on a stir plate,typically 24-48 hrs before brewday. I have been pitching the whole 1liter into my wort. Do you guys decant? And if so,why?
 
I usually decant. The starter "beer" is not fermented in ideal conditions so, to keep off flavors to a minimum I will decant. Less than 1 liter, I sometime pitch it all. 1.5 and over I almost always decant.

Check out the online calculators. 1 liter, really, might be too much for some beers and way too little for some big beers, or especially lagers.
 
It depends on my mood...most of the time I pitch the whole thing...I've decanted twice in 26 brews and haven't noticed any difference
 
I decant.

Here's how I look at it. I have spent hours going over my recipe, yeast selection, making the starter to the proper cell count, I'll wait weeks trying to perfect the fermentation temperature before packaging.

1 liter is 5% of 5 gallons. I don't want to do something that may negatively effect by beer intentionally. I'm sure I'm making 5% mistakes unknowingly, let alone diluting another 5% with starter wort. It doesn't take me any longer to decant. This doesn't make my way the right way, just the right way for me.
 
It depends. If I have time I decant.

I brewed Friday. I started a 1 1/2 quart starter with some harvested pacman yeast Wednesday night. The starter was made with some wort I canned from the second runnings from a darker batch.

I am saying this because the batch I brewed Friday was 5 gallons of a light amber ale. I didn't want any other flavors or to change the color so I decided to crash and decant the starter.

I did it a little differently then I have done before because of some stuff I read on Brulosophy (I think) about yeast washing and crashing the washed yeast. They found that there was still a boatload of yeast in the decanted washing liquid, possibly as much or more as what had settled in a day. It seemed a shame to waste it.

I cold crashed the starter on Friday night, after my brew day was done at about 7:00 p.m.. On Saturday, at about 11:00 a.m., I decanted out the starter beer, which was pretty clear and left about a 1 1/2 cups of cloudy liquid and yeast. What I did differently, was instead of pouring it down the drain, I put it into a couple 1 liter cleaned and sanitized pop bottles to harvest from later. I want to see how much yeast I am typically throwing away.

In addition to that, I didn't pitch right away. I warmed the starter up to room temperature then took about a liter of wort from the amber batch and added it into the yeast in the flask. I put it back on the stirplate and let it go for about 8 hours. In that time it had a good kreusan ring going and was really milky. I pitched it Saturday night. 10 hours later, Sunday morning, it was bubbling away in the airlock and I needed to change to a blow off tube.

After a day the liter pop bottles have a small layer of settled yeast, maybe about a teaspoon or two between them. I'll probably leave them for a couple weeks, decant the liquid, combine them and freeze it.
 

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