BeerBorg

did a partial mash kit from NB... about 60% grain to 40% lme. I used whirlfloc ( I think ) in the last 8-10 mins of boil. when transferring to the fermenter I run everything through a sieve to catch excessive hops as I toss them into the boil loose. this also serves to aerate.

on bottling I noticed 2 things:

1) I under did my topping off by about 1/4 - 1/2 gallon. no biggee just makes stronger beer

2) I had nearly 3 quarts of trub in the fermenter. unlike the usual dense slurry of yeast and hop crud this was more like a loose slimy pudding like quicksand. it had gelatin like bubble encapsulated stuff that looked like tapioca mixed in with yeast slurry and hops.

I suspect the whirlfloc is the culprit.

I tried to pour this slop through a filter to salvage the missing nearly 3 quarts of wort but seriously... there didn't seem to be any wort in the muck at all??!

question: does this happen a lot with all grain or mostly grain batches?

question: is this normal for whirlfloc use? if so do I need to compensate by adding more water when topping off?

question: would lining my fermenter with a paint strainer bag when transferring then pulling it out catch more potential trub? or would this be a waste of time?

The whirfloc causes stuff to coagulate and drop to the bottom of your pot. The more grain you use the more "break material" you end up with regardless, but whirlfoc helps to drop it out. When folks say they whirlpool while cooling and leave a trub cone behind in the pot when they siphon off their wort or talk about cooling fast to get a good cold break, it's that material they are talking about.

So what you did is basically dump a good bit of it into your fermenter instead of siphoning and leaving it behind.

It will not harm your beer, some folks even have found that it seems to help you have a more robust fermentation if you dump some or all of it in the fermenter. But it does increase the amount of trub significantly if you dump it in vs. siphon and leave it behind, so volume wise you might end up with a bit less to bottle. And if you use a spigot, it might make the trub higher then the level of the spigot which could cause issues. (autosiphon as a backup would be handy then).

I did notice that the fermentation seemed more robust than usual for us05. normally 05 forms a tiny blanket of dense krausen for me, then chugs away slowly. this ferment made a higher kruasen and seemed to be largely done in a week.

so 'break matter' is really that disgusting? lol... the words snotty diahrea came to mind on seeing what was left in the fermenter.

It sounds about right. FWIW, how nasty it looks also depends on the yeast, how well it flocculates and compacts everything.

Also, FWIW, if I do a PM with more extract then grain, I tend to just dump it all in and not worry about it. Spending the time to siphon/rack carefully means more exposure to my bretty house air. Which leads to this:
If I do an AG batch, I try to be careful and leave much of it behind in the pot because it becomes problematic, but then I'm more likely to get the brett, so I tend to do my AG batches mostly in the winter where the house Brett is not as active. So I am not simply trading one problem for another.