WTF! first batch with wild yeast. infected?
 

hello. i caught some yeast in my yard a while ago and i decided to use it to funk up some robust porter i was brewing. so i split the boiled wart between 5gal and a 1gal fermenters. the 5 gal i did with regular yeast, the 1 gal with wild yeast. the idea was that i would sample the wild when it was done and if the flavor seemed like something that would work, i'd add it to the 5 gal.

well, when i sampled it it tasted pretty fantastic, so i racked them into a separate fermenter and let it sit. i was planning to let it sit for a while too, because i figured it would taste best if it matured some, so it has just been sitting in this fermenter a couple weeks.

now the fermenter is not transparent, so i couldn't see into it this whole time and today i decided to give it a look, and well, it looked pretty f-in weird.
kind of like one of those alien egg collections from sci-fi movies.

first thing i thought, of course, was infection, but doesn't that smell real bad. this looks awful but smells fruity and delicious.

anyone ever seen anything like this? what should i do?

http://et-ia.com/dropbox/wtf.png

Looks like a pretty characteristic brett pellicle. When you say "i caught some yeast in my yard" were you expecting it to be like brewers yeast? Most wild yeast is what people refer to as "infected."

That is the most beautiful 'infected' beer picture I've ever seen. Perfect circles of CO2 bubbles. Just wonderful. My sour beers never look as cool as that.

It looks like nothing is wrong if you just took some random bugs from outside. If it tastes good then all is well and you're set up for a kick ass beer.

When I first looked at that picture, my thought was "This guy has an electron microscope at his disposal? COOL!"

same here...

phew! that's good news. i thought i was probably ok, because it didn't look like any of the stuff you're used to seeing like mold, etc. and it does smell great.

so do i wait for this to fall like krausen? or can i just rack and bottle?

yeah, i thought the same thing when it popped up in iphoto. it came out better than i expected.

thanks for the input guys!

+2!
4567890

I'm really interested in knowing how that tastes!

To me, that looks like a picture taken by a scanning electron microscope! Did you actually take that picture?

Very nice!!!