Stout sediment question

I brewed an oatmeal stout two weeks ago and I have had it in the primary for the entire time. Yesterday and today I took hydrometer readings using a "thief". Afterwards on both days, I noticed that the thief had a lot of "stuff" stuck to the sides of it, maybe hops?

When I poured the cooled wort into my carboy I passed it through a funnel with a strainer. I thought I did a good job of filtering out the hops then. Assuming that I did not, should there still be this much free-floating stuff in the beer at the two-week point?

Its likely yeast or proteins, nothing to worry about. Some of the krausen will never settle and just sit on the surface until I rack the beer off of it.

Without a specific description, the "stuff" you are seeing could be hops or it could be trub or the sediment left over from fermentation! When sampling did you put the "thief" all the way to the bottom of your fermentor? It may be a good idea to take samples from the upper layers since the bottom contains all the trub and any "stuff" on the upper layers of the beer is most likely just yeast.

Trub is basically the dead and dying yeast cells mixed with live cells and any proteins, hops, and general "junk" that gets left.

If you used whole leaf hops you should have filtered them out at transfer.

Did you taste the samples? I always taste any samples I take when brewing. It may not help too much with quality but it is kind of fun to follow the flavor changes when brewing. If they taste good then you have nothing to worry about!

Thanks for the info guys!

Penguin--now that you mention it, there does seem to be some krausen residue hanging out on top. I will assume that is what is sticking to the thief.

Kevin--I tried to be careful and not insert the thief deep enough to disturb the trub, but that doesn't mean that I was successful. And yes, I stole a taste--makes me want to chill some now and enjoy.