I'm brewing an amber tomorrow so I made a starter this morning. Target OG is 1.075, the yeast was 1272. I used 4 oz DME for about a 1200 ml starter. I do not have a stir plate, and no foam stop, covered the top with foil. Tonight I gave it a good shaking and it fizzed and foamed like crazy and overflowed just a bit. It doesn't do that now when I shake it, but it still fizzes, it sounds like shaking a glass of soda. My questions are is this normal, and is it still okay to use it? This is only the second time I've used a starter and this didn't happen the first time. Any advice is greatly appreciated, just need to know if I should grab another yeast packet in the morning.
Yes and yes. It's CO2 coming out of solution. Lots of it means your starter is working. Less of it later means your starter is done, or nearly so.
Lets see if I can help. When you take yeast and put it into wort, typically you have one of two agendas. Since I used the word _wort_ before _agenda_, I'll speak To that first. 1.035 is a good ballpark for a starter. It looks like you did that. So did you feed your yeast or did you propagate them? Those can be two different concepts. Propagate means to grow cell count. If you have the correct inoculation rate you do both. Plugging your numbers into a yeast calculator, if you are doing a 5 gal batch with a 100% new packet, you slightly under-pitched. So what did you do? You pitched some yeast into a proper wort, it foamed up and it started to not foam. Sound like it did it's thing. So you have some very healthy cells. I'll take a low cell count of healthy cells anyday. Now you did say 1.075. Research aerating wort and do the max that you think is best. If your packet/vial was new, that will trump any need to try any new fanged method of aeration. yeah, no big errors. actually no small ones either
