Dry Verses Liquid Yeasts

[RdeVjun]

I'd suggest that a 300ml starter is too small to pitch a full pack of fresh liquid yeast into. You may well not see anything if you only make this size starter as the whole thing could be done overnight. As Screwtop said, you just won't get much (if any) yeast growth which is what you are trying to do.

To keep it simple, I'd say that a 2L starter is more like it and you'll be probably see some krausen. For about 20L-25L of 5% beer, that should about right. It'll probably be fermenting vigorously by the next day and you can just pitch the whole 2L starter with an ale as long as you kept the temps fairly reasonable.

Thanks Stu, it was actually split into 2 * 300ml starters, but you're quite right, so is Screwy. Its just that I've just had quite reasonable results, or at least no bad experiences (with flavour or laggy fermentation), with just a ~400ml starter grown out in a 500ml Schott. Obviously that's underpitching but in all honesty I can't say I've noticed any bad effects compared to a yeastcake reuse or bigger starter, although it has always been at the back of my mind that it might be sub- optimal. I can't really knock the results as they've met my expectations, but this gives me some food for thought, so many thanks. :icon_cheers:
If it were for a lager I'd certainly go up a size, in fact my brother and I did that over the past winter and we made a couple of batches of very decent Munich Helles with 2042 and a similar process but with 2 * ~800ml starters in 1000ml Schotts from a single pack stepped up a couple of times through the 500ml bottles, eventually graduating them to the 1000s.

In retrospect ghhb, perhaps that 4 litre flagon you have would be better for this sort of thing in future, just need to be ruthless with sanitation (cleanse, sanitise and boil/steamer, plus boil the starter wort) and keep the Schotts for yeastcake harvest and storage, stepping up from a small inoculant such as a slant or a dribble from a previous starter etc.