My good friend and I have recently begun to use yeast starters for our beers, and have been very pleased with the reduced lag time and vigorous fermentation this has brought to our batches. However, I am a little confused by how three separate (great) sources of yeast starter information (appear to) differ in their recommendation for starter size, and I was hoping to get some opinions about which one I should follow. It's probably that I am just not properly using the tools that each of these provide.
Let's take the example of our latest brew, a fairly low gravity American Wheat beer. This is a 5.25 gallon batch with an O.G. of 1.043. Many of you may think this is actually a small enough beer to not even require a starter, but all of our sources recommend > 1 pack of the Wyeast American Wheat Ale we used, so I felt it was not a completely unreasonable candidate for a starter. For this example, we are talking about yeast with a manufacture date of 7/10/2012, and we used a stir plate.
So here are what our three sources by default recommend that we pitch (all of these recommend 1 packet of yeast pitched into our starter):
BeerSmith2 Starter tab: - .55 Liter
Mr. Malty - 1 Liter
YeastCalc - 1.5 Liters
The YeastCalc tool will allow me to manually set the starter size to 1 liter, but it defaults to 1.5 liters, so I presume that he is trying to tell me that this is the optimum inoculation rate (55.3 millions/ml vs 83 millions/ml). And BeerSmith2 will allow me to manually enter 1 liter as my starter size, and then provides an estimate of cell count based on that, but Brad's default is .55 liter. If I manually enter .55 liter in YeastCalc, he tells me that is an inadequate cell count.
Would anyone care to weigh in on this? I picked 1 liter because I use a 2 liter Erlenmeyer flask, and I like the large surface area that 1 liter of liquid in a 2 Liter flask provides (for my stir plate). I also like that 1 liter is lower in the flask, so boil over isn't as big of a problem. I have read that inoculation rate is important for starter size; does that mean I should have chosen a 1.5 liter starter size instead of a 1 liter size, since 83 million/ml is kind of at the high end?
Let's take the example of our latest brew, a fairly low gravity American Wheat beer. This is a 5.25 gallon batch with an O.G. of 1.043. Many of you may think this is actually a small enough beer to not even require a starter, but all of our sources recommend > 1 pack of the Wyeast American Wheat Ale we used, so I felt it was not a completely unreasonable candidate for a starter. For this example, we are talking about yeast with a manufacture date of 7/10/2012, and we used a stir plate.
So here are what our three sources by default recommend that we pitch (all of these recommend 1 packet of yeast pitched into our starter):
BeerSmith2 Starter tab: - .55 Liter
Mr. Malty - 1 Liter
YeastCalc - 1.5 Liters
The YeastCalc tool will allow me to manually set the starter size to 1 liter, but it defaults to 1.5 liters, so I presume that he is trying to tell me that this is the optimum inoculation rate (55.3 millions/ml vs 83 millions/ml). And BeerSmith2 will allow me to manually enter 1 liter as my starter size, and then provides an estimate of cell count based on that, but Brad's default is .55 liter. If I manually enter .55 liter in YeastCalc, he tells me that is an inadequate cell count.
Would anyone care to weigh in on this? I picked 1 liter because I use a 2 liter Erlenmeyer flask, and I like the large surface area that 1 liter of liquid in a 2 Liter flask provides (for my stir plate). I also like that 1 liter is lower in the flask, so boil over isn't as big of a problem. I have read that inoculation rate is important for starter size; does that mean I should have chosen a 1.5 liter starter size instead of a 1 liter size, since 83 million/ml is kind of at the high end?