Question about top cropping

[Ellis]

In the attached photo, you can see a clear difference between the darker, more clumpy material, and the white, more frothy material. Do I harvest all of this? My instinct says to discard the brown clumpy stuff, and keep the white stuff.

There seem to be many helpful resources on yeast washing, but not so much top cropping yeast. Is there a good reference you can recommend?

 

[Nateo]

Your instinct is right. The white stuff is what you want, the brown stuff, not so much. That's actually the whole point behind top cropping is being able to select only the healthiest, most active yeast.

 

[pericles]

I agree that you want to grab as much of the healthy yeast as possible, and as little of the trub.

But top cropping - which is usually just done with a spoon, after all - exposes your beer to the risk of infection, as well as the yeast you're harvesting. When you're "selecting" your yeast to crop, realize that the process is not a very delicate one: grab what you can, and then rinse it later.