As always, I have issues and questions and I turn to all of you wonderful homebrewers to help me out. 1) I realized too late that I want to pitch a second pack of yeast as Mr.Malty says i need 2 packets with a yeast starter for a 1.105 SG. So, I have 1 pack of Wyeast 1056 in my possession now that I will make a yeast starter for tomorrow AM. I wont be able to get my hands on any other yeast until Brewday (Saturday). I can get a vial of Whitelabs 001 which is supposed to be similar. Would it be ok to just pitch the Whitelabs in along with the Wyeast 1056 starter? I know it might sound ridiculous but I was wondering if that is an option. 2) How long in Primary, how long in secondary and how long in bottle? I was thinking 14 days/2 Months/6 Months but I can do whatever is best for the beer. Thanks!
1) Yeastcalc says you should have 352 million cells for 5 gallons. How big a starter? How old a pack? How old a vial? Play with this calculator and figure out what eat addition is to get to the right number ( http://www.yeastcalc.com/ ) 2) Keep it in primary until it is done. Then secondary if you want to. If you believe the secondary will help, there is no point not leaving in there for the whole time you want it to age.
I think you mean billion cells. I usually figure 1million cells/ml/plato. For a 5 gal (20L, lets make math easy) you need 5.25^11 cells. How large a starter depends on your yield. I typically get 200 million cells/ml from my stirplate starters so I would need 2625ml. Since you do not have much time I would put the whole pack in the starter and toss it all in. Acutally I would just wait until I had a proper starter. Ideally, I would start with a smaller starter volume and work my way up 5x each time. So I would start with 500ml and when that was done cold crash and put in 2625ml or just add 2000ml more to the active 500ml. One more thing you can try, and I have been doing without ill effects. A homebrew Yorkshire Square type deal where about 12 hours after pitching I sanitize another bucket and pour from one bucket to the other and back to the original. This will give the yeast another little bit of oxygen. So with your timelimits I might just make a starter, toss it all in, and try the homebrew Yorkshire Square type deal.
I am guilty of underpitching my yeast a lot of times but I am starting to get on track with that so I will not comment too much on that part. However I will say that if you have an extra secondary I really like the effects of bulk aging my big beers in a secondary plus it takes up less space than bottles. Do what works for you but I have had good results.
i concur with nicefly on the yeast front. when it comes to the fermentation i would just use the primary unless youre considering adding something to the beer. ive used a primary for two months on an RIS without any autolysis iasues if thats whatnyoure worrying about. if youre transferring to add something in, i would still go three weeks in primary just to keep it on that big yeast cake as long as possible.
