under pitch or make starter for mixed culture?

[dawn_kiebawls]

This summer has absolutely blown by me and I just realized I'm sitting on 7 packages of yeast (2x madfermentationist saison blend, 2x ECYBugfarm, 1x ECYBugfarm2 and 2x ECYBugCountry) that are at or approaching their 'best by' dates within the next week.... I'm going to finally get my ass in gear and become a one man beer factory, but I'm wondering. Is it best to under-pitch (straight pitch the vials) or make a small starter knowing it will thrown off the already skewed population ratios of yeast and bugs?

I'm going to likely make two extract sours and do an experiment with maltodextrin and some leftover orchard juice I have in the freezer (sour/funky cider, possibly dry hopped) just to make sure all the yeast gets used.

Thanks for any and all help. Cheers!

 

[IslandLizard]

Is East Coast still packaging in those small, squarish bottles with the tall caps? If so, some contain as much as 400 billion cells at packaging. Even his sour mixtures (e.g., BugFarm, Dirty Dozen) were pretty royal pitches as is, each bottle enough for 10 gallon inoculations, IIRC. So there should be plenty for a 5-6 gallon pitch in each bottle. Even after 6 months. Or even a year.

There's no harm in making starters either. Make them 1-2 liter for a few days and pitch the whole shebang. Or just pitch some extra sacch concurrently with the mix. Or ferment 1/4 -3/4 way with sacch, then pitch the bug mixture.

Since you have doubles in there, why not experiment with different pitching methods? One straight up as is, the other with a starter of pre-sacch fermentation. So many ways to infect, there is no real rule, go wild!

If you're making 7 different batches, yeah, you're gonna have a real brewery going there for a while.
Got enough fermenters? Secondaries?

Make sure to include a decent amount of flaked or even raw adjuncts (for turbidity) in the mash, so there's some food left for Brett, once she gets going.

 

[dawn_kiebawls]

Thank you for such a great response! As I was pacing around my kitchen trying to make a brew schedule for all these vials (yes, they're still in the square bottles. It says it contains 350 billion cells. Thank you for making that point) it finally occurred to me that I don't have enough secondaries lol. D'oh!

I really like your idea of experimenting with using a clean yeast and then infect them allowing the sacch to do most of the heavy lifting. Not only will that take some of my 'time crunch' away but it will also allow me to utilize my one remaining clean beer fermentor.

The original plan was to brew 8 different batches but I only got one brew in before life got in the way. I thought I had plenty of adjuncts in that batch but it went to 1.002 in about 2 weeks. I also don't think I mashed high enough and skipped mash out so it was highly fermentable wort. Lesson learned!

Thank you again for your response, giving me some great idea and taking a huge load of stress off my mind. Cheers!