Halcyon Malt? Sour and Cloudy Results

I recently brewed a very simple bitter with 7.5 pound of Halcyon and few specialty/caramel grains. I followed all my sanitization procedures and pitched a healthy starter.

Two weeks in primary, then I kegged. The beer is very, very, cloudy and has a slightly sour aroma, tastes fine though. I even used the yeast cake for a brown ale......I originally thought I had a lacto infection, but I am thinking this just may be some poor quality malt. I had an off sour aroma in the primary, but no ropiness or visual signs of infection.

Has anybody had any problems with this malt before?

Do you normally recycle yeast cakes? How did you do it, exactly?

It most certainly is not the Halcyon

babalu87 said:

It most certainly is not the Halcyon

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I disagree, I think I got some bad malt. I used the yeast cake, with a small amount of the "sour" beer still in the fermenter for an india brown ale. It has been two weeks and the beer is fully attenuated and has ZERO sign of the "infection". I would have thought that if the first beer was infected, my next would be, using the same fermenter and yeast cake.........no such infection.

Or maybe the yeast just outgrew the infection and "snuffed it out" so to speak. It is a pretty harsh environment for microbes now....70 IBU, dry hops floating around in it and %7 ABV.

babalu87 said:

It most certainly is not the Halcyon

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I agree that it is not the Halcyon in general, but he certainly could of had a bad bag that hadn't been stored well.

Did you taste the malt before brewing? How did the wort smell/taste before pitching?

Oldsock said:

I agree that it is not the Halcyon in general, but he certainly could of had a bad bag that hadn't been stored well.

Did you taste the malt before brewing? How did the wort smell/taste before pitching?

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I didn't, I ordered the entire recipe all precrushed, have had fantastic luck with malt from this place before, had no reason to think this could be bad. But I think that is what it was. I wonder if from HBSS's sometimes malts like Halcyon, are a bit of a gamble since they likely sit around for a very long time....not that popular of a malt. That just my guess as to what happened.