Here are a couple of pictures I took while making a 3 litre starter with Wyeast’s 1968 yeast. I began the day with smacking the yeast pack. For 3 liters of starter I used 300g of dry malt extract (I always use 10% malt extract, which gives me an OG of about 1.035).

I weighed up the malt extract and mixed it with 3 liters of boiling water in a pot. I boiled the mixture for 15 minutes, while mixing up a StarSan solution.

I put the yeast pack, a pair of scissors, some aluminum foil, a stir bar, and my starter vessel in the StarSan solution, after which I emptied the starter vessel and filled it with the boiling wort. I capped the vessel with the sanitized aluminum foil and let it cool. Cooling was speeded by using a water bath.

After the wort had cooled enough, I cut open the yeast pack with the sanitized scissors after giving it a thorough shake, and poured it into the cooled wort. I then put the aluminum foil back on, and placed the vessel on a stir plate. About 36 hours it looked like this:

Before using, I put it in the fridge for 24 hours, so that the yeast settled to the bottom, and then poured of approx. 80% of the wort. I pitched the rest into the intended beer, and less then 24 hours later the beer was fermenting like mad!