Does fermented wort stratify?

Here is a situation and a question:

I have 10 gallons of wort in a suitably sized fermenter. I pitch yeast and fermentation progresses and the yeast settle; so now I have still beer on a yeast cake.

I use a 5 gallon bottling bucket. If I auto-siphon 5 gallons from the bottom of the fermenter into the bottling bucket am I going to have a 'different' beer than the remaining 5 gallons in the fermenter? In otherwords, does beer stratify with regard to unfermentable sugars or alcohol? Or is it all one homogeneous liquid?

hmm, thats a good question.
My guess is that it does not stratify (with the exception of yeast and particulates which take weeks, even months to settle out completely) since anything left in the beer is not really in suspension, but in solution.

Was just listening to the Dry Hopping brewstrong podcast yesterday and Palmer makes it a point to rack to 2 5 gallon kegs at the same time from his 12 gallon conical. He was primarily concerned about dry hop flavors from what I gathered.

No, once the fermentation is done, you won't see any stratification. During fermentation, the CO2 produces enough mixing to keep it even. About the only time I've seen stratification is when the fermenter is in a cooling bath and the bath is much cooler than the wort.

You might see some slight differences in the bottles because of the settling of the yeast, but they'd be minor.

I'd probably agree with all this... "particles can stratify, but dissolved things don't."