Beer Forum

I've been under the impression that the WL vials initially contain approx. 100 billion cells, but I was listening to The Session this morning on the way to work and Jamil was referencing 30-50 billion cells per vial. Now I'm completely confused.

Maybe he just had a few too many, or possibly he was factoring in the typical loss in viability by the time the average consumer gets the vial? His pitch rate calculator assumes 100B cells per vial, so I'm probably worrying about nothing here. But that made me wonder if I was under the wrong assumption about the cell count.

http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/homebrew_information.html

My last vial was shipped to me from Northern Brewer in the hottest days of the summer ( 4 days on a Fedex truck ). the ice pack I ordered with it was warm-hot when I took it out of the box. I'd say my vial probably has about 100 in it...100 cells that it.

Whether it's a Wyeast "smack pack" or a White Labs vial, I've always worked off the assumption that I was getting 100 billion cells from a fresh container. My staters and repitches have always worked reliably and consistently, so in practice, I think 100 billion is a functionally good assumption with a fresh package from either lab.

i count on both labs providing about 100 billion cells.

but it looks like there are way more cells in white labs vials....at least some of them, sometimes. I had a few vials from white labs that had a HUGE yeast pellet that took up more than half of the container....must have been way more than 100b cells in there.

I used to count yeast cells with a hemacytometer. I can kind of tell that you are getting more than what the package states.

It was one of the really early shows, September '05. Maybe White Labs was only putting 30-50B cells in the vials back in '05.

If anyone wants to hear what I'm talking about, go to 2:02:05 from the Sunday Session 9/4/05.

Don't have time to listen to myself, but I would assume I was talking about Wyeast propagator packs, which have 30 to 50B. The Wyeast activator and White Labs vials have about 100B cells.

JKoravos wrote:It was one of the really early shows, September '05. Maybe White Labs was only putting 30-50B cells in the vials back in '05.

If anyone wants to hear what I'm talking about, go to 2:02:05 from the Sunday Session 9/4/05.

I listened, and Jamil is definitely talking about White Labs, so I think this is exactly the case where they used to only put 30-50B in the vial and then upped the number to approx. 100B in more recent years.

jamilz wrote:Don't have time to listen to myself, but I would assume I was talking about Wyeast propagator packs, which have 30 to 50B. The Wyeast activator and White Labs vials have about 100B cells.

Not a big deal. It just freaked me out for a second, because I thought I had been under the wrong assumption for all these years. Now that my assumptions have been validated I feel all warm and fuzzy again.


***Obligatory comment about how the Pope is infallible.***


Now I'll say 3 'hail mary's' and 4 'our fathers' for penance.