I transferred this cake to the container after vigorous swirling. The upper layer is odd to me. I have been getting it on the last several slurries i have transferred. It doesn’t settle out and it smells like fresh yeast. When I scoop it off it is almost like a gelatinous raft and comes off pretty easy without breaking up (too much).
I saved the raft off of the last slurry and I think I’m gonna try to make a starter with it…just to see what happens.
What is it?
Should I scrape it off or swirl it in before I distribute to smaller containers?
Looks like a krausen layer but I don’t know how that could be when the yeast appears to be settled out. How do you harvest your yeast and what storage procedure do you use?
That’s just a dense foam that the yeast formed. Top fermenting yeasts like to do that and the foam gets very stable. It can also happen at the end of fermentation and is no reason to be concerned. Ideally all top fermenting yeast should eventually collect in the foam on top of the beer since this is how they got their name. But that’s far from being true. You can break it up by swirling it around if you need to settle out all the yeast. But make sure you don’t make more foam which is where this comes from.
I think this is also a way how you can tell a lager yeast slurry from an ale yeast slurry. You foam up both and the one which forms a stable yeast head is the ale.
I siphon the beer off of the cake and into the bottling bucket leaving just enough beer to swirl and break-up the cake. When the cake is loose i pour it into the larger container and refridgerate then when i get time i will distribute the large container into about three pint jars.
So the top layer contains good yeast? It seems cleaner than the settled out slurry.
Thanks for the help
