BeerBorg

Hello everyone,
I am very new here,
There seems to be more choices of kits available for 5 or 6 gallon size batches and I have read about brewing a 5 or 6 gallon batch and putting it in 2 Little Demon Conical fomenters.
My question is how do you divide up the yeast equally?

Thanks in advance

Do you have a gram scale?

Otherwise, just use something like a 1/4 teaspoon and go back and forth between two fermenters until you've used up the pack.

Or hydrate the yeast in a cup of water, and then just pour half a cup in one and the rest in the other.

Most dry yeast packets are 11 or 11.5 grams. I use a gram scale, but before that I did it by sight. I take a coffee filter and rip it in half, and pour 1/2 the yeast onto one filter, then 1/2 on the other filter. Either by eyeball or by scale I adjust if needed, then pour it in.

There are lots of dry (and liquid yeasts). Brewdemon, and Mr. Beer, have an ale yeast, a wheat yeast, and usually recommend a lager yeast for a lager recipe (in a commercial packet).

You can always use a full 11 / 11.5 gram packet of yeast in a small batch of beer, but you're just wasting it. I always split dry yeast across two 2.5 gallon batches.

If you only have one pack and are splitting it, then do what they described above, and it will work fine as long as you follow normal ferment/condition/chill/drink times as are described on this forum.

But if you happen to have a spare pack, then I'll just say the idea of using both instead of splitting, IE "wasting it" as described is a matter of opinion, which I might have argued as such in the past but will no longer do based on experience.

IE, if you go by "pro brewer" pitch rates as found in:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitc ... alculator/

Then that 11g pack of yeast may be just about perfect for 2.5 to 3 gallons.

And I can attest that that kind of pitch rate has given me better beer faster. I've been pitching at Pro Brewer 0.75 for 1.05-1.06 ales and Pro Brewer 1.0 for 1.07-1.08 ales, and Pro Brewer 1.25 for ales bigger then that. And if I could force carb my beers I'd be drinking them just days after they were out of the fermenter. Even my bigger 8-10% beers. I can turn around those big beers in 7-10 days if I wanted to bottle that fast. Basically I can brew anything I want and turn it around as if I was brewing a mild or bitter if I want to. There is nothing that needs to "clean up". It comes out clean.

There is a lot of information on that link that explains the reasoning and I'm not going to argue with it because I can attest that I'm making better beer faster since switching.

So yeah, I pitch a lot of yeast. Most of the time at least. Exception being some wheat yeast where I want more banana because those pitch rates do suppress the banana.

WOW!
Thats a lot of info for a guy who just made his first home brew.

There are 4 teaspoons of yeast in an 11.5 gram sachet.

I would rehydrate in a measuring cup and split the slurry, less chance of contamination.

What dawg says