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Starter tab always recommends 1 pkg for dry yeast, regardless of age

MarlinTheBrewer

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Just an observation that the dry yeast recommendation appears to be fixed at one package regardless of the age of the yeast.  I entered a package date of 2001 and the software says the viability of the yeast is only 5% but still suggests that only 1 package is required for the batch.  Wouldn't you think that five, or ten, or even twenty packages might be required if there was only 5% viability left?  It also appears that dry yeast never has less than 5% viability -- I can enter the yeast date as 1970 and it is still 5% viable.  Note:  I don't really have yeast this old, but as the viability drops I would expect that using more packages of yeast would make sense.
 
I am not seeing this behavior.  I changed the yeast in one of my recipes to a dry yeast from Lallemond/Danstar.  When I changed the date backwards toward 2001, the number of recommended packages went up from 1 to 6 progressively as the viability decreases.

5% is the lower limit of viability for all the yeasts so the software bottoms out at that level.  I see the same thing with other yeast starter calculators I have used.
 


I might be not be doing something right, but attached is what I see in BeerSmith 2.3.7, which I think is the current version.  It never changes from recommending 1 pkg of dry yeast, despite adding or changing yeasts and dates.  I guess now that I know it's wrong, I can do the math and estimate the number of pkgs to use (assuming the viability calculation is correct for yeasts > 5% viability).

I should add that the yeast starter feature I'm having a problem with is launched from the Starter button within a recipe.  This has a somewhat different look and features than the Starter tab that is launched from the Yeast Starter option on the Tools menu.  The Yeast Starter tool seems to compute the number of dry yeast packages correctly.
 
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