Well, I'm sure this will be interesting. At this point I probably have shocked my yeast to high heaven, and I was taken a bit off guard by the low viability estimate on my vial of yeast. I had planned on doing a starter wed for pitching today, but had underestimated the vial viability until this morning when I ran the calculator on it. I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to salvage this...Here's what I've done so far:
Went to the homebrew shop to get stuff for an all-grain saison batch. The only liquid saison strain they had was WLP-568 (saison blend) that was "best before 5/14/14", so 108 days or so old. Est 21-25% viable according to Mr. Malty or BrewersFriend. So...warmed that sucker up on Wednesday and made a 1.1L starter at about 1.025 SG. Pitched, ran it on a stirplate overnight. Put it in the fridge around noon Thursday. Removed from fridge 10am today, made a second 550ml 1.040 starter and chilled so that the new wort and old slurry were at a similar temp. Added that to 500ml of decanted, loose yeast slurry from the first starter (est. combined gravity to be about 1.022). Set that on a stirplate around 11am in a room about 72F.
The calcs say I should have somewhere between 75-100 million cells per ml per degree plato.
The plan is to let it warm up and do its thing on the stirplate, and pitch it tonight (probably done brewing around 10pm). The alternative is to wait and brew tomorrow morning, and pitch at about 9am.
Suggestions? Anyone have thoughts about what I should do?