How Long

[Bryan S]

Have you gone without feeding a starter. I just pulled my 2 out of the fridge dated 07/22/2005 since last fed. A friend of mine Rita Yeazel who does a lot of recipe testing for Maggie Glezer, Author of "A Blessing Of Bread" and a couple of other books, both have gone a year in between feedings just to see if they would work. Rita claims she and Maggie never had any problems with one year old starters. I'm curious to see if mine will take off. They smelled fine, so we shall see. 

[ernestrome]

If it smells ok and is not discoloured then you have little too lose. It might start to smell bad once fed though.

[Bryan S]

Update: Well the New Zealand is growing nicely, close to high Krausen. My San Fran is a lot slower, just starting to take off. They both smell fantastic.  Yeasties are tuff little buggers. I've abused them many times when brewing beer, wine and Mead. 

[Kinsman]

Wow, a year in the fridge...cool.
I've gone a week at room temp, and I have a sample that's ten days out.  I'm gonna go a full two weeks and see how she acts.  I bet it will be fine.

The cultures that some folks are selling appear to be dried, ground starters.  They reactivate just fine... a little slow at first but after a few days of care & feeding they are happy as pigs in sh   clams at high tide.

As I've said before here, my cultures go two or three days at RT without any attention, sometimes a whole week, and after being fed, they go nuts.

[Bryan S]

Both of mine came from Sourdough International. As i said in the first post Rita and Maggie tested them after one year. I fell ill and just forgot about them until the other day, 18 months later. So now i know they will restart after 12-18 months without feeding them. I'm not planning on going that long again it's just good to know that they should be fine if forgotten about.