Failed yeast washing?

I washed the yeast from my last batch......however I seem to have not done a very good job, got a lot of trub underneath the yeast. Is it ok to make a starter from the whole thing or should I try to get the clean yeast off the top somehow?

 

I would just toss it all in. The brown layer is still mostly yeast.

Of course, I never wash my yeast, I just repitch slurry, trub and all. This is recommended by people as fancy as Chris White and JZ.

 

I have taken jars of saved cake that look just like yours and created a starter from it. I used mrmalty to determine how much slurry I needed and then sucked from the yeast layer using a graduated medicine syringe.

 

Looks like you just poured off a lot of the trub layer of the yeast when you did the initial seperation. You could decant and then use if want, or you could re-wash to try and remove more of the trub.

 

If you really want to seperate it, you could shake it up and let it settle for about 20mins, that should settle a lot fo the trub while the yeast would remain in suspension. You could decant off then and make a starter with the dacanted liquid

 

Depends how much cells do you have. Try to estimate density in B/ml, usual wisdom is that washed yeast contains between 1-2 B/ml. After that, calculate how much cells do you need for next batch.

Here is good pitching/stepping calculator:
http://www.yeastcalc.com/