What is a starter and what is its purpose?
A starter is a small volume of wort that yeast use as an initial step to become healthy, multiply and prepare themselves to ferment a batch of beer. The starter’s purpose is to create enough clean, healthy yeast to ferment your batch under optimum conditions. The primary focus of a starter should always be yeast health first and increased cell growth second. Many brewers mistakenly focus on cell growth at the expense of yeast health. It is much better to have a smaller number of very healthy, young cells than it is to have a large number of weak, cells. As Logsdon puts it, “Would you rather have an excess of 80 year-old people building your house or a smaller amount of really healthy 20 year-olds?
