old washed yeast has a big brown band in starter

[bowzwald]

im using some washed wyeast american ale thats probably around 4 months old and has been sitting in my fridge. Let it sit on the stir plate for 48 hours. No signs of activity for about 24 hrs as with the other washed yeast ive used. Its going strong right now but there is more of a brown band then ive ever seen before. I was planning on stepping this up one more time and brew a DIPA with it but now im worried i wont have enough healthy yeast in there. Thoughts?

 

[kh54s10]

The white layer is the yeast. For yeast that old I would do a stepped starter. Make a small starter to get it going then a decant and add another wort, maybe even twice to get the final size.

If the bottom is what you are worried about, maybe there was more trub left in your washed yeast or maybe more trub in the starter wort than you are used to. It looks good to me. I am not sure about the amount of yeast cells in the layer of yeast though.

See http://yeastcalc.com/ for information on starters.