Yeast Cake Possessed?

[BackAlleyBrewingCo]

Hi all,

Last weekend I poured the yeast cake (harvested Bell's Oberon yeast) from my latest batch (American Wheat) into a couple of mason jars and threw them into the fridge. This weekend I pulled one jar out of the fridge to warm up a little before pitching. After two hours or so I noticed that the settled yeast was 'erupting' bubbles - one every two or three seconds. Not sure what that meant, I decided to play it safe and pitched dry yeast instead.

A little more background - the batch that the cake was from took a fairly long time to ferment out - 2 weeks for the gravity to settle. It was on the yeast for 3 weeks total before racking/harvesting. The latest batch tastes fine, and I didn't detect any odd-aromas from the cake yesterday.

So what would cause the bubbles? Just yeast being yeast, or should I be concerned that I have a bug and just dump the cake?

Thanks,

TD

 

[curlyfat]

I see this with any yeast cake that I use. I chalk it up to the fact that yeast is alive (or at least it should be) and living things do strange things.

I've never had an issue using yeast that had the tiny eruptions. Even when I pull a secondary out for kegging, I'll see this sort of thing after it sits out for a few minutes. I'm guessing it's just some CO2 escaping from the cake.