Then I poured about half of this water into the carboy that has nothing left but the yeast cake on the bottom of the fermenter (the beer was moved to the keg a few hours earlier). I swirled it around and poured in into Ellie's coffee pot. I then let it settle for about 30mins. This fermentation came out really clean and as such it didn't appear to have too much dead gross yeast in the cake.
After about 30 mins the yeast is meant to layer out. In my case I did see the layer of beer on top which was very small. I didn't see the layer of gross on the bottom that I was expecting to see. I think I can conclude that there was a lot of healthy vibrant yeast in this ferment. Clean yeast is a key to good beer so yeah on me. I then poured the mixture from the coffee pot into two pint sized mason jars and put them in my beer fridge.
These should be used a couple of months. I plan to use one of them for Elf King Ale II this coming weekend. I'm thinking of using the other for a porter or stout for St. Paddy's day fun later.
Here's a pic of one of the pint mason jars after a week in the fridge.
You can easily see the separation of the yeast from the beer. I will simply need to decant (pour off) the beer and then I can directly pitch this yeast or I can make a yeast starter. I would make a yeast starter to get the yeast awake and ready for fermentation.
That is a lot of yeast. Likely too much. This much yeast will likely not provide an increase in cell count. I believe that is what kicks off the esters and EKA have wonderful esters that I might like to maintain. This will be a good experiment to see how estery the turns out when I used this next.
