Also we don't have Danster and the Wyeast London 1318 that I purchased in August is getting a bit long in the tooth and I wanted to try to do a yeast starter. I have not yet got all the parts to make a stir-plate so I have gone ahead and used two smack-packs instead of one and will shake the conical flask periodically.
Starting with the Brewers Friend Yeast Pitch Rate Calculator I came up with the following:
Ideally you don't over-pitch by more than 20%.
If the calculations above turn out to be correct, we would have over-pitched by 25billion cells which would be over-pitched by 28%, unless we upped the batch size to 23 litres.
We have the 25 Litre bin available for the next batch, so space for the krausen in the top of the fermenter. At least 4 litres of head space. So the maximum is 21 litres. If I scale the recipe to 21 litres, this brings the number of cells in the starter within 16%. We have a plan.
Preparation
1 x Erlenmeyer 2 Litre Conical Flask
153g Dry Malt Extract
Scissors
Spoon for stiring
Starsan
Water
2 x Wyeast London 1318 smack packs - removed from the fridge, smacked and set aside to inflate
The boil : First Try
I read up on how to go about this and there seem to be two methods.
1. Boil in a pan
2. Boil in the flask
Everyone seemed to be saying that boil in the flask is too difficult, but that didn't stop me.
After cleaning and sanitizing the flask, I put water into the flask and placed it on the electric hob. All good.
I then tried to weigh out the DME. And that is when the fun started.
DME is kind of like Ovaltine or Horlicks, i.e if it is mixed with a small amount of water it turns to cement. Even the slightest amount of water that is barely detectable makes it turn into something that you have to scrape off. So after carefully weighing it out onto the scales I tried to pour it into the flask, directly from dish that sits on the scales, which has a groove to direct that which is being poured from it. The rising steam stopped the falling DME in its tracks and turned it to concrete. I then tried to spoon in the DME and found it then stuck to the spoon. By this time it was now stuck to the bottom of the measuring dish. My measurements by this time were all messed up as I could not account for how much DME was still stuck to the spoon and the dish. So I discarded the DME and opted for the boil in the pan option.
The boil : Second Try
This time I put a measuring cup onto the scales and weighed the DME into the cup. I did not want to use a spoon.
I measured out the water into a pan, dumped in the DME and brought to the boil.
Once in the boil, I kept it boiling for about 10 mins, before putting the pan into the sink with cold water to chill a little. I then used a funnel to get it into the flask. I covered the flask with a piece of aluminum foil sprayed with some starsan and put this back into the sink.
This was by far the easiest.
Pitching the Yeast
I did not measure the temperature of the yeast or the flask. The air temperature in the house was 20C and after leaving them all on the side for a couple of hours and feeling that they all were slightly colder than my hand, I decided that they must be under 30C and the yeast and wort would be within 10C of each other.
I sanitized the smack packs and the scissors. Cut each of the packs open and pitched them in. Then gently swirled them to thoroughly mix with the wort. Job done.
Lessons Learned
On reviewing I did not sanitize the lid to the boiler at all. It would have had steam hit it so hopefully it was sanitized enough.
To simplify this a pan with a lip could be used to avoid having to use a funnel.
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