pitching a starter?

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

yeastinfection

Landlord.
Joined
Mar 28, 2015
Messages
944
Reaction score
299
Location
coventry
so i made a stir plate a while ago,but havent used it yet...
so today i made a starter as im doing a no chill, so i have 24hrs before pitching,
my question is,,a few videos say to chill the starter and pour out the spent wort,, aparently its not nice,,,
yet another video says pour it all in it doesn't matter.

confused.com
what do you guys do? any help appreciated,:grin:
or is 24hrs pointless?
 
I never "time" a starter.

I usually kick it off the evening before I intend to brew, check that it has produced some bubbles and yeast overnight and then, when the wort is cooled to the required temperature, remove the spinner and chuck the lot into the wort

If it makes my beer taste funny I haven't noticed ... :thumb:

... but at my age apparently 50% of my taste-buds are knackered anyway! :whistle:
 
I never "time" a starter.

I usually kick it off the evening before I intend to brew, check that it has produced some bubbles and yeast overnight and then, when the wort is cooled to the required temperature, remove the spinner and chuck the lot into the wort

If it makes my beer taste funny I haven't noticed ... :thumb:

... but at my age apparently 50% of my taste-buds are knackered anyway! :whistle:
thats my plan, :thumb:
 
I think it depends on the beer. If it is smallish starter, like 1 liter, and for a normal beer, then I just chuck it in. I'd be more inclined to cold crash and decant the spent wort if it was a big beer, lager, or very clean beer. Big beers and lagers need big starters, and pitching a 5L starter will mess up the volumes, and I wouldn't want to pitch that much spent starter wort. This is particularly bad for lagers or clean beers, as the taste of spent starter wort won't be masked by other flavours, like hops, roasted grains or yeast character.
 
I've made growth starters on stir plates for years, using various calculators for estimated cell counts, and when I do those, I chill, decant the spent wort, warm it to ambient, and pitch. Recently, however, I've been making "vitality starters" - on brew day, as I heat the strike water, I dump a liter of canned starter wort onto my yeast and by the time I'm ready to pitch, I have an active fermentation in my starter, and I dump the whole thing in. The jury is still out on whether I'm getting the results I want - mainly getting to the predicted final attenuation gravity - but the bottom line is, on a stir plate I chill and decant (sometimes up to 3 liters) and for a vitality starter I don't.
 
Thanks guys, as its my first time doing this,and as its a small starter, im just going to bung it all in,
makes sense to decant it though when its a larger volume, :thumb:
 
Plan A for today was simple.

Take the kettle full of cool water (boiled for five minutes last night), pour 400ml into the sanitised jug, stir in some malt exact, add 5g of Youngs Lager Yeast and stick it on the stir plate for five or six hours to do its thing while I got on with brewing a batch of lager. :thumb:

Plan A was scrapped when I found the kettle full of boiling hot water after Sister-in-Law had made her morning cuppa ... :doh:

... so I finished up sprinkling 2 x 5g packets on the froth instead! :thumb:

Perhaps Trappist monks got into brewing because they didn't have any women around to screw things up! :whistle:
 

Latest posts

Back
Top