I'm planning to split a kit five ways to do a test on different water types. The kit is a two-can 3.6Kg LME kit (St Peter's IPA made by Muntons) that's designed to make about 20 litres of beer. I figure I'll get five PET one-gallon FVs to brew in, weigh the LME and split into five, add the appropriate water, and split the hop extract five ways (should be doable by eye).
The main question I have is about the yeast. These Muntons kits come with a 6g yeast sachet, which is pretty small to start with. Splitting it 5 ways is going to be 1.2g yeast per fermenter, which sounds very small.
Options I can think of:
- Just split it and not worry. Probably rehydrate first (in distilled water) then split the liquid/sludge as well as I can.
- Use a starter to bump up the volume a bit, then split that.
- Try to find out from Muntons what kind of yeast they use (it's been labelled "X HND 6 G YEAST PREMIUM MADE IN EU" on other kits I've had from them) and getting four new packets and using one in each. I'm a little worried that inconsistencies between the packets might mess up my test, but perhaps I could rehydrate them all in one batch and then split that five ways?
Do any of those options sound like they're obviously better than the others, or just completely crazy? Are there other things I should be considering?
(Also, is there anything else about this experiment that strikes anyone as a bad idea?)