Soooooo, I may be overthinkimg it, or perhaps I'm not as sharp as I think I am, but what are you guys using to measure and pitch the yeast slurry in? Are you just using the flask that the starter gets made in, or perhaps I'm using some sort of big syringe? I'm stumped.

For a fresh pitch (from a starter), I just use the calculated amount of yeast from Mr. Malty.

I'm still probably over pitching from slurries tho while I figure out how to estimate yeast counts without the a microscope or hemoseptometer(sp?).

But, how do you measure the calculated amount?

If I'm growing up from a vial, I trust to my calculations based on starter size, etc. If you are looking to pitch a slurry from a previous beer that has been rinsed, you can use any sort of glassware that has gradations on it... graduated cylinder, smaller flasks, etc..

You are going for hemocytometer here. Hemo-blood cyto-cell



If I understand right, it's what I'm doing... as in, a 100 bil cell vial in 2L starter at 1040 should give you roughly 200 bil

You could ball park it by just looking at it. If it looks somewhat thin and watery you probably are at enough for a low gravity beer, somewhat viscous (milkish) and a good peanut butter color is probably enough for average beers, extremely thick (cream) dark peanut butter with a little bit of floc once you turn off a stir plate is a high grav beer and for largers it's almost instant floc with a large amount settling and a light brown.

It's not perfect but its the cheapest way to start. At work we use condensed chicken soup as a comparison to eye ball growth at a given time before putting it on a spectrometer and measure its absorbance at 600nm.

I think this is a really great question. I'd be really interested to know what tools people are using for yeast management overall.

I picked up some yeast harvested straight from a fermenter from a local brewery here in StL & I just used Mr. Malty & measured the slurry via measuring cup and pitched into starter to ensure viability. Not sure if that is right or not but the slurry was so thick felt this was the best way.