Settling Yeast for Decanting
So you've listened to all the advice from your fellow brewers about making a yeast starter.
Heck, you've made a great starter. You've swirled and mixed this starter everytime you laid eyes on it. Maybe you went on Ebay, Labx or Cynamr and found yourself a stir plate so you could have even better growth (A 4-10 fold increase interests you doesn't it? Makes $20-40 spent seem well worth it).
Now here's the problem though, you went and tasted the starter. Egads, oxidized foul tasting brew. Do you really want to throw that nasty stuff into your nice clean pristine beer?
If you've got a day, you can force settle your yeast in the fridge. To see what happens over the course of a day, I present a little slide show of a day in the life. Make sure that before you use the yeast, you decant the starter and feed the slurry with a bit of wort to wake it back up and to stir the yeast back into solution in time for pitching.
0 Hour of Settling
2 Hours of Settling
10 Hours of Settling
24 Hours of Settling
At the end of 24 hours the yeast cake has nicely compacted down, with the wort clearing above the sediment line. Now all that remains is to pour off the spent wort and reinvigorate it in time for the brew day