Floating Protein Chunks?

[HopHead73]

DIPA with about 9oz of Hops in the kettle for a 5gallon batch.
Fermented with Wyeast 1056 at 61degrees and slowly raised to 68 by day 6 and kept it there until 16 days.
Transferred to secondary with 2oz of Simcoe and 1oz of Amarillo for dry hopping.
It's been 11 days and I planned on bottling it tomorrow, but this morning I found these chunks that kind of look like fat in chicken soup or pieces of white bread floating.
I took a quick sniff from the bung and it still smells delicious.
I gave the secondary a little twist and the chunks started to break up and some pieces seemed to settle.

My guess is they are just protein congealing. I did use whirlfloc. I'm just a little concerned that they are only showing up now so late in fermentation and aging.
I should be good to bottle tomorrow though, no?
Maybe put a muslin bag on the end of my auto siphon to try to prevent from sucking up too many chunks if they are present tomorrow?

 

[NordeastBrewer77]

Looks like clumps of yeast. They probably floated up from the bottom of the vessel. No worries.

 

[HopHead73]

Looks like clumps of yeast. They probably floated up from the bottom of the vessel. No worries.

Yeah that was my other guess. It got a little warmer the other day, 72 instead of 68 degrees, and I was thinking possibly some CO2 release raised some yeast chunks.

It does have a lot of trub that has settled out into the secondary.
Anyone ever use a muslin bag on their auto siphon to help from collecting too much crap?

 

[NordeastBrewer77]

Yeah that was my other guess. It got a little warmer the other day, 72 instead of 68 degrees, and I was thinking possibly some CO2 release raised some yeast chunks.

It does have a lot of trub that has settled out into the secondary.
Anyone ever use a muslin bag on their auto siphon to help from collecting too much crap?

There ya go, co2 releasing could definitely get those guys floating.

You could try the muslin bag on the siphon, I've done that to avoid hops. But, IMO, it's a major PITA. Time should help those chances settle out, and since they're coagulated, you should be able to avoid them pretty easily.

 

[HopHead73]

Update:
More yeast floated up since it's been warmer and more CO2 was being released and I couldn't control the temp as much since my fermentation chamber was busy with another IPA.
But, that batch had pretty much finished up so I decided to pull it out of the chamber, just for the night, and throw the DIPA in there and cold crashed it over night. And what do you know? All the floating yeast chunks have settled nicely back to the bottom.
Time to bottle!

 

[Brian555]

Thanks for the thread HopHead. I had the exact same issue with the same concerns. The picture really is worth a thousand words. I also was brewed a DIPA. I thought an infection was caused by the 6 oz. dry hop i used for a 10 gallon batch. The interesting part is that the same thing happened in both my 6.5 gallon carboys i used for this batch. I also plan on entering this DIPA in a competition so needless to say I was concerned.