OK, this topic has probably been beat to death for years, but I'll ask again. I'm new to break down a few all grain batches that it turned out very well. Now I want to take another step. Yeast, my next batch calls for just over 200 billion cells but the snack pack only has 100 billion. Can someone point me in the direction of a good YouTube video or article that can help me turn 1 billion into 2 billion cells.
( oh and if you could do this with cash as well I do going to look at that article )
The snack pack has 100 billion cells only?
Okay, here's where I wander off into one of my favorite topics, brulosophy. They did a pitch rate test and the testers could find no difference between the normal pitch and the "underpitched" batches. I don't consider Brulosophy definitive brewing science but it's instructive at our scale. But a couple of things are going on here where homebrewing doesn't quite match what the big boys, source of most of the science, do:
1. We usually pitch fresh yeast (okay, I know many of us keep yeast from one batch to the next). The numbers in the calculator are based on repitched yeast. Ours, particularly if we do a starter, are a lot more vital and ready to do their job.
2. We don't control things as closely. There are warm spots and cool spots in the fermentor, particularly if you're not measuring the temperature of the beer itself. So your yeast is probably working warmer than the tests would indicate.
3. The higher cell counts might not be needed anyway. The difference between 100 billion cells and 200 billion cells when dealing with the kind of growth we get in a fermentor is about 20 minutes, or the time it takes a generation of yeast to reproduce. With enough nutrition and enough initial oxygen, the yeast will take care of themselves.
4. The only difference between growing your money, say in an investment, and growing yeast is the rate of growth.
That said, I generally do starters for anything above 1.055 or any lager. It seems a bit safer and it's cheap. A yeast starter won't exactly double the cell count but it will get it into a range where even the calculators say you're good. I'll be picking up DME this afternoon to do a starter for my Mexican Dunkel, to be brewed Sunday....