One smack pack or Vial enough for a 3 or 5 gallon batch?

[eluterio]

Working on fine tuning my equipment and doing basically smash beers right now. Not worried about anything but my efficiency right now. Im all over the place with it and want to get it squared away. Im wanting to brew either small 2 to 3 gallon batches or a low gravity 5 gallon batch.

I dont want to make a start is number 1. Im good with buying several yeast packs and just using them. I know the pack usually say they are good for 5 gallons of wort 1.060 or below but we all know thats not so true.

I know making yeast starters at 1 to 3 litters with a og of 1.040 or lower works great to get x amount of yeast cells to be used in a 5 gallon batch depending on the OG. What I dont know is this the same with 3 gallons to 5 gallons of OG at 1.040 or lower and using one pack??? Is there enough yeast cells to not stress them out in fermenting a bigger volume?

Does this make sense or Im i over thinking this?

Thanks HBT

 

[PRE66_6TART]

Well, everyone here is going to tell you to use a free yeast calculator to figure out exactly how much you need, but I usually just do a quick calculation to see if I'm in the ballpark, since the calculators are working off of assumptions anyway.

The rule of thumb is a million cells per ml per degree Plato so 3 gallons (11,355 ml) of 1.040 (10 Plato) wort would be:

11,355 x 10 x 1,000,000 = 113.55 billion cells

One fresh smack pack or vial should have close to 100 billion cells so in this case you're probably close enough, but above that you're probably going to need extra yeast.

You can go with less or more yeast depending on the style and what character you want to get from the yeast. Between 750,000 to 1.5 million cells per ml per degree is what I've seen mentioned.

 

[eluterio]

Thanks for the reply you know I didn't even think to look that up.


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