In this paper we study explicit peer methods up to order p=13 which have the strong stability preserving (SSP) property. This class of general linear methods has the favourable property of a high stage order. The effective SSP coefficient is maximized by solving a nonlinear constraint optimization problem numerically to high precision. The coefficient matrices of the optimized methods are sparse in a very structured way. Linear multistep methods are obtained as a special case of only one stage.