Beer Forum

so i need to build up a starter ( from a fairly old smackpack) for a beer thats getting almost 30% of it's fermentables post high krausen. would i be right to target my starters growth to the post boil gravity? or the gravity of beer after the secondary fermentation?

thanks in advance

-Paul

i don't mess with the gravity of the starter, I only adjust the volume of the starter. mrmalty.com

right. sorry bad wording.
i guess what im asking is whether to set the mrmalty calculator to the postboil OG or secondary fermentation OG

i would say post boil OG

I may be misreading this but it sounds like you are asking about adding yeast to secondary. In homebrewing, the only time you normally add a second charge of yeast is when fermentation stalls out at too high a gravity. If you build your wort correctly and pitch the correct amount of healthy yeast (usually in a starter), you don't need to worry about adding more yeast.

One thing that confuses a lot of folks is that homebrewers almost never do secondary fermentation. At the end of primary fermentation, many folks will rack the beer to another fermenter and call that secondary fermentation. That is actually a bright tank, NOT a secondary fermenter regardless of what most folks call it.

A true secondary fermentation involves adding more fermentables after the initial fermentation is complete. This may or may not also involve adding more yeast.

Older brewing books, including Charlie Papazian's classic, tend to instill a fear of yeast autolysis in new brewers. This leads them to rack the beer off the yeast cake before fermentation is complete and have the beer try to finish fermentation without most of its yeast. This often results in higher final gravities and unwanted esters in the beer. You need to leave the beer in primary until fermentation is complete and then some. Leaving it there after visible signs of fermentation are gone and even after your expected final gravity are reached will often result in better beer. This extra time will give the yeast a chance to metabolize those esters they produced at the beginning during reproduction. Once this has happened you can proceed directly to bottling or kegging without a "secondary". Some folks still do, but this is just to allow additional yeast and other solids to drop out of suspension, leading to a clearer beer.

If I misread you I'm sorry, but a lot of less experienced brewers don't really understand this "secondary fermentation" issue.

Wayne

no i mean a secondary in its true sense.
im brewing a golden strong and i prefer to add the sucrose after the yeast has burned through the maltose from the initial adjunct free fermentation.
i usually just like to use 2 new viable packs of yeast and step them up from there. but unfortunately all i have now is a single smack pack of yeast at about 35% viability so im getting all paranoid about it.
anyways
target gravity for my beer is about 1.060, about 3/4ths of the way into that fermentation i will be adding some simple sugar. enough that if i had added it during the boil the OG would be about 1.083.
should i target my starter volume to ferment a beer of 1.060 gravity, or 1.083?
i figure that if i pitched for a gravity of 1.060, the growth from that fermentation would be more than adequate to take care of the 20 some gravity points i add later?

sorry for not being more precise in my questions, i appreciate the advice

id probably make the starter for a 1.070 beer. happy median.

I say hit the 1060 stater mark. Because after 3/4 of the ferment there will be more than enough yeast to chew through the simple sugar added.