Funky gunk on my beer

Hi all, I washed an extra 2 gallons of water through the spent grain from an IIPA and ended up with 1.035 gravity wort. I boiled it for 20 min with two centennial hop additions, cooled and pitched 1 pint of my IIPA starter (wlp001) and ended up with <2gallons 1.040 wort. After 4 days fermenting, it has this weird looking gross gunk at the top that looks to me like flocculate with some yeast on top. Any ideas what's goin on here?

it doesn't look like any krausen I've seen before. I should also add that I strained the wort through a sanitized paint strainer bag before transferring it to the carboy. This is not hop matter, and it shouldn't be cold break. This is my 16th batch, and my 10th all-grain batch. The carboy (and a couple others next to it) have been averaging about 66* since Sunday afternoon. This is all stuff I would have expected to fall out and become trub by now.

It looks like the top of my friends carboys who make mead.

Looks like the time i pitched dead yeast. It just hydrates,soakes and swells up, then stays on top.

Ugh. Great. That's possible. I began with a 2L starter, poured 3/4 of it into the IIPA, then poured the rest into this small beer. I think a hydrometer reading is in order. (sigh)

This has been sittin at 1.004 (down from 1.04) for a few days so I bottled it. Tastes great! Dry, crisp, a little malty and bready, and a hint of the centennial that I used (prolly will be more than a hint when I'm not stuffed up). So, all is well. Just goes to show ya, rdwhahb. Never forget Papazian's mantra

Hello from 3am,

I've had the same thing happen on the last couple batchs I did (one with US-05 and one with WLP002). I also was a bit concerned, especially since every other time I've used the 002, it went straight to the bottom and made a nice, tight yeast cake. Anywho, a little research on here and it seemed that the general consensus on this was that the yeast clumped up and was forced to the top by CO2 coming out during the fermentation. Many of the posts I read recommended giving it a good sloshing to break it up and get the chunks of yeast swimming around again. I did that with the 002 (the US-05 was already bottled, and delicious I might add, by this point)...Long story short, I gave it a little slosh (well, more of a swirl, I guess) and it broke up that layer very efficiently. The clumps swam around for another couple days then sank right to the bottom leaving the exceptionally clear beer I've come to expect from 002.

I know you already bottled, glad to hear it came out awesome, but I figured I'd chip in the bits I found when I had the problem, just in case you run into the same anomaly in the future.

Thanks guitar_sean, much appreciated!