Add DME Starter To Beersmith?
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No. That DME is fermented out (mostly) by the time you pitch it to your batch. It probably does affect your final ABV a bit, but it's not enough to even bother with the calculation. Think about it. If your starter ends up being a 2.8% beer and it's 1Q that you pitch into 20Q of wort, you can take your final gravity of your beer, figure out the ratio of 2.8% beer to (whatever your final ABV calculation on the main batch is) and figure it out. But it's likely to be less then a 10th (of ABC), and likely have less impact then any other measurement error (like misreading your hydrometer or having residual C02 in the sample) could have.
Point is...it's just not practical, and definitely not necessary to worry about the dme you used in your starter.
As a side note, I'm not sure how you could have put your starter dme (what was it? 4oz?) into a 5G+ batch and seen more than a point or 2 of difference. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say: "I see that it can significantly change the OG and FG."
Well that makes sense. As far as the gravities, with the 8oz DME (2l starter) the OG was 1.060 / FG 1.017 and without it is 1.055 / 1.013.... Significant? Maybe not.... LOL
OK, I gotcha. I don't consider that significant, but anyway, the answer is no, you don't include it. You can include a starter on your recipe and it does change your anticipated FG and ABV, but I think that has to do with pitch rate or something...rather then figuring out the abv, unfermented sugars of your starter and factoring that into your final batch.
Don't forget that you can cold crash your starter and decant the clear beer off the top of it before pitching and take most of this question out of play anyway.
Don't forget that you can cold crash your starter and decant the clear beer off the top of it before pitching and take most of this question out of play anyway.
Are you getting those projected FGs from Beersmith? If so, ignore them. Adding a starter (or not) won't change the FG. It's just a simple calculation that is a default setting, and not going to predict your actual Fg. Your FG will not change based on 8 ounces of DME and a little liquid at all.
You will get 4 points added to your OG if you add the starter (.5 pound) but if you add some liquid to, it will be a wash.
What I mean is your recipe may be 1.060 with the starter, and 1.056 without it, but you are also adding 1.5L of water, too, so you'd be making a 5.25 gallon sized batch with the same OG. So it'd be a wash. If you decant all of your starter's spent wort, then you'd be adding 0 in fermentables, so again, it'd be a wash.
Ok. I didn't have the time to decant for this brew and wanted to be as accurate as possible. I figured since I "brewed" the 8oz DME, then I should account for it somewhere. I didn't think about the additional water. It seems that the best route is to just omitt it from the recipe and decant.
