The yeast floating is flocculation (yeast comes together). Totally normal. It will drop inside of a week.
I never seal my buckets when fermenting. Don't worry about it. You'll be fine.
Anybody have an update? I ended up adding dried cherries about a year ago. I just bottled it about an hour ago. The taste I jut sampled was amazing. Smooth lactic sourness. Light on the funk. Nothing remotely acetic. Great cherry pie like taste. Can't wait for it to carb up.
They do still pasteurize, but their method is different from your standard filtration method. So while there are still some critters sitting at the bottom of the bottles.... They're all dead.
Actually yes, it's quite sour and a small amount of Brett funkiness. Lacto usually takes that long to do its job for two reasons, one is IBUs and the other is alcohol. Both of those things slow down lacto. So by pitching lacto prior to the sacc there was no alcohol to slow it down.
Just to...
Keep in mind my recipe for that was using lacto and Brett only.... No pedio. In most true lambics pedio does the bulk of the souring, and it is slow and needs time because beers with pedio go through a "sick" phase where the pedio produces a lot of diacetyl that takes some time for the Brett to...
Definitely go with real fruit. I did a beer with a raspberry extract when I first brewing and it really tasted artificial. Yes using real fruit is more labor intensive, but the end result is so much better. And if possible get some local fresh peaches at the height of the season. I did mine with...
I did a peach saison a few years back that was out of control good. I used under-ripe peaches, and a ton of them. 3.5 lbs. of a frozen puree I made of fresh peaches went in at 20 minutes then 2 lbs. flame out, then I threw 5 lbs. more of chopped into the secondary for 10 days. The reason for so...
Cold crashing will work, but finings will work better. For future reference though it's a good idea to put your hops in a hop sack and weigh it down with marbles. At my LHBS I saw this mesh tube that you insert in the neck of your carboy and fill with hops, seemed cool but never got one.
And as...