Eman
Master
You guys talking about starters, when I do that I usually get a pint of wort and make that my starter. If you toss a full pint into 5 gallons of wort you will see fermenting almost immediately.
Yep, it is noticeably more active much faster when you do it that way. For some high gravity brews, it's probably not possible to do it any other way.
I remember dogfish head brewing had a show on Discovery or somewhere that they were talking about the difficulty on one of the beers they make due to the high alcohol content... I forget which one, they have a lot of high ABV beers. Anyways, they would occasionally have to dump an entire batch because the yeast would die off quickly and there would be no way to salvage the product... It as painful to watch that much beer go down the drain, especially considering just how expensive one batch would be.