Yeast washing...

Tried a little experiment with yeast washing to see what would happen.. I didn't use this yeast afterwards, because I had just done a fairly high gravity beer with it and couldn't go down gravity next.. so I did it just as an exercise to see what would happen. Check the pic:

In the photo, I'm pointing at the middle layer of good yeast that could have been re-pitched, had I wanted to. Wait, backup. Process! As I understand it, you boil about 1/2 a gallon of water or so, and then cool it, just to sterilize the stuff.. then, when you've racked a beer just out of primary and you have that big pile of junk on the bottom, you pour this cooled water into that fermenter and swirl the stuff around to loosen it up. Then, take your also just cleaned and sanitized 1/2 gallon growler, like the one in the pic, and send all that goop from the fermenter into it. Give it a swirly, and then let it sit. After a few hours, or overnight, the trub and hop matter will sink to the bottom (seen just under the white-ish later I'm pointing at here..) and stay there. The good yeast is the stuff in the middle layer, and supposedly, the dead yeast float on the top layer.. What appears to be "beer" here, is actually just the boiled and cooled water that's mixed in with some other stuff, which made it pick up some color that gives it that amber look.

This is all very interesting and you'd think "great, now I've got a good pile of clean yeast to re-pitch" but the problem came when I tried to separate it.. the stuff just all starts to flow out in a three colored stream and I couldn't get 'em to be distinct, separate piles of goop. So, what now? I dunno.. maybe a different vessel with a larger opening to pour out of would have a different result? I'll have to goof with it some more. Good experiment though.. was interesting to see the way it turned out..