Slime Beer (Sick phase)

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ChugachBrewing

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Just wondering who here has had a beer go through a sick phase before...? I've got a 50gal barrel of sour beer that is definitely 'sick' and am curious if anyone has had any experience with this. I am aware the pedio is currently in its exopolysaccharides phase, and have already spoken with Michael of the mad fermenter. He's seen it once. Anyone else?

It tastes great, but the texture is like maple syrup that comes out your nose and is exceptionally viscous. Hasn't changed in a month and a half. Going to be a hard brew to push.

I put it under a microscope and the bugs are busy. Looking for serious responses here.
 
Subscribed. I am curious about this since I haven't (but plan to) dabbled with pedio, yet.

Could you maybe provide a recipe along with mash temperature? (If it's a high mash, the complex sugars may be causing the pedio to take longer to do it's work, but that's just a conjecture).
 
Infusion mash at 153.

100 lbs M.O.
6 lb Munich
2 lb SP-B
7 lb light munich
2.5 ea roasted barley and chocolate
6 lb aromatic
8 lb wheat
 
I've got one in the bottle now where the pedio has kicked back up. It's thick and buttery like fake maple syrup. A friend was very excited to get some De Garde bottles when they were released. Most were borderline undrinkable because of the ropiness. Fun to pour though, I'd never seen a beer look like that before.
 
This isn't buttery at all. It has strands that will stretch across the room like a hot glue gun. Did yours ever go "regular"?
 
I'm pretty sure that grain bill and mash temperature rules out my idea as to why it might take so long in the sick phase.

It looks like you probably had a decently high OG (for a sour), so that is probably at least a factor in this. (I am not surprised that you would have a big. wild. ale. at all ;) ). Though, your signature makes me think that this isn't the first big sour that you have done... I would expect some consistency in microbial behavior to similar environments.

Hopefully one of the guys that does commercial brewing chimes in on this. I obviously am out of my element here, but I respond in the hopes that it draws some attention to your thread.
 
This isn't buttery at all. It has strands that will stretch across the room like a hot glue gun. Did yours ever go "regular"?

It's only been bottled about two months, but I'm hoping it does because it was tasting great when bottled. People rave about De Garde so I'm assuming their stuff clears up.

One of my WLP665 batches was pretty thick when I transferred after about a month and has cleared up, but it wasn't anywhere near what your's sounds like.

You've heard the interview with Vinnie where he talks about seeing Jean Van Roy pour a snotty sample? I'm sure yours will clear up. You should email Vinnie. It was a few years ago, but he said he'd love to hear from anyone with sick beer.
 
Yeah, it took 2 tries before I swallowed a gulp. I have a shot of it from my scope but can't load a wmv or whatever. PM me with an email and I'll send it to you.

@marvaden, yeah i do this a lot. i have a few other things posted.
 
Mine with pedio from ECY have all gone through a sick phase. So far thats 4 beers in the last two years. One even got sick again in the bottle using the original Bug County release in a saison wort. It took a year to clear up in the bottle. My fermentors seem to get sick with in 3 months of brewing, I ferment totally with the souring culture, not as a secondary pitch. It can take a while to break down and sometimes it will get to the point where you are not sure if its body or remaining exopolysaccharide. When that happens err on a very thin remaining exopolysaccharide for a bit longer.

I will check my sour imperial stout today, that thing was borderline gelatin 3 months ago.
 
What temperature is the beer sitting at? I think higher temperatures get the Brett more active and it works on the Pedio products.
 
This beer has a lot of different bugs in it. I pitched every strain from the EBY experiment.

I am by no means an expert, but could biological overload be a cause here maybe? maybe the sheer amount of different bacteria is what's causing problems?
 
I am by no means an expert, but could biological overload be a cause here maybe? maybe the sheer amount of different bacteria is what's causing problems?

I'm assuming Chugach has a ton of bugs in there as well, but the EBY experiment strains were all Brett isolates, right?
 
I'm assuming Chugach has a ton of bugs in there as well, but the EBY experiment strains were all Brett isolates, right?

Not sure, but from my (extremely limited) research, brett doesn't cause ropiness, but pediococcus and acetobacter can
 
Not sure, but from my (extremely limited) research, brett doesn't cause ropiness, but pediococcus and acetobacter can

Right, pedio is usually the culprit. I was just guessing that the EBY brett strains aren't contributing to the sickness as they should be pure yeast without other bacteria/bugs.
 
I would imagine pedio is present, since many of the strains came from beers that are known to have pedio in them. I'm guessing that is what's doing it. I'm not sure of the EBY process, but perhaps there was some pedio in there. Not sure what else it could be.
 
Sorry but isnt this "sick" texture a good thing? Are you just concerned about how to "push" it out of the barrel? I think if you can just wait it out you will be in good shape. I cant say I am speaking from experience though, so I am probably not the right person to answer this. I have a friend who brews beers commercially and has experienced sick beers. He posts on here - I am going to see him on Thurs and tell him to take a look at this thread.

I remember an awesome podcast from the BN where they had Vinnie in the studio with the crew and he talks about bugs and barrel aging. If you skip to the end around 03:44:00 or so Vinnie talks about his beer being sick in the bottle and discussing "ropiness" with the Cantillon crew who tell Vinnie that beer being sick is a very good thing and will lead to a beer with more depth. http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/membersarchive/dwnldarchive01-17-10.mp3. It is going to go away - it just might be a while.

All that said I would love to see some pictures of this.
 
As I mentioned previously, I am aware of what is going on within the beer, I know it is a good thing - I just threw this out as a thread in the event anyone else has experienced it and what their experience was.
I'm guessing there may have been some contamination from the original strain/sample, as it was slimy before the barrel and my sanitation is fairly good. 99% sure it wasn't the cellar, cultures were blended and then brought to the barrel in isolation, but I won't rule anything out 100%.

Thanks for the responses, I'm just trying to gather as much info as possible. I'll post some photos by the end of the week.
 
As I mentioned previously, I am aware of what is going on within the beer, I know it is a good thing - I just threw this out as a thread in the event anyone else has experienced it and what their experience was.
I'm guessing there may have been some contamination from the original strain/sample, as it was slimy before the barrel and my sanitation is fairly good. 99% sure it wasn't the cellar, cultures were blended and then brought to the barrel in isolation, but I won't rule anything out 100%.

Thanks for the responses, I'm just trying to gather as much info as possible. I'll post some photos by the end of the week.

Photos! I would love to see how viscous this thing actually is :)
 
@ChugachBrewing:
Do you remember which strains were affected? This may allow us to get a connection to the beers I isolated the strains from.

I guess you mean something along these lines:


I actually cannot rule out that there might be some Pedio in the samples. I did not use any antibiotics back then. I did not encounter any problems with any of my samples so far. So I cannot tell where you got your Pedios from.

Cheers, Sam
 
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I didn't note them, didn't think too much into it at the time. Just FYI, don't think I'm complaining by any means, I'm just being scientific ;) .

Also, now that work has died down and I've gotten a microscope, I hope to be getting more of my cultures processed. I'll be sending you some samples (Sam) in the next month or so.

Yes, it looks JUST like that video. Hard to swallow.
 
@ChugachBrewing
No worries and I don't mind honest observations. That's how it should be. Otherwise, if no one is allowed to criticize your work, where would we all be today?

As I said, I cannot rule out that some Pedios may have been in the samples since I never plated the samples on antibiotic agar. However no one got back to me with such results so far. I know that various people had a look at the samples and did not mention any bacteria contaminants.

Let me know about results of your microscopy investigations. And I am already looking forward to get new yeasts to play around with :ban:

Beers from Fantome seem to be especially prone for ropiness...
Cheers, Sam
 
Maybe a spell of warm weather will "loosen" things up, as well as activate some of the brett? iirc, from Wild Brews, a second Brett phase is supposed to come along after the pedio/lacto and lean things up.

Hopefully it breaks up a bit before you have to move.
 
Right, but I thought that tended to happen when temps cooled? I could be mistaken, someone has my copy of wild brews right now. Here's to hoping.
 
It seems "slightly" less ropy. That being said, its still very, very viscous. I'm hoping that warmer temps will 'get the yeasties excited to eat some munchies' :)
 
If not, I wonder if there is an enzyme that will help break the polysaccharides apart that is commercially available.
 
I haven't done much looking into the exopolysaccharide composition so I don't know the types of bonds that would need to be broken. That would be the way to find out if there's an easy to source enzyme for breaking the bonds. Some are easier than others to hydrolyze depending on which carbon molecules and whether alpha or beta.

I did a gravity check on my high gravity stout like brew. Its still sitting around 1.032 and I brewed back in the summer and racked into the barrel sometime in July. It's still very viscous and suspect my actual gravity to be more like in the 20s. It's sour, roasty, and slightly bitter. It'll be good it's just taking a while. I think I may rack this into a 1/2bbl sanke with a 4" TC top if I can get my hands on a keg and convert it. Then I'll throw a lower gravity brown beer in after this stout.

Anyhow this culture in this stoutish beer is ECY02 and it got ropy. I think I remember reading somewhere that they selected this pedio for its ropy characteristic. Seems weird to me to purposefully choose a bacterium for that characteristic but maybe he knows something I don't. The home assembled culture I have gets PLENTY sour and has no extreme rope issues that i know of. I may dump some of my home culture in with this beer to thin out the rope faster than is typical of an ECY strain. Afterall the ECY cultures are just a baby mixture of single strain isolations compared to a truly wild culture which may contain as many strains of saccharomyces as all the different organisms in an ECY culture combined. I think the single cell isolations and subsequent mixes misses the mark on the cultures on an enzymatic front. They seem to concentrate on flavor attributes but not so much the fermentation strengths of what they're throwing in the mix. More diversity means greater variety of enzymes produced and or different concentrations. So while one brett strain will produce x amount of hydrolyzing enzyme for alpha/beta 1-6 carbon to carbon sugar bond, another strain may produce 10x more of the enzyme making the fermentation move that much faster and reliably but not produce the same flavor and aromatic profile.
 
Did you ever try emailing Vinny and asking his opinion? I hear he is really helpful and fourth coming.
 
I sent an email through the brewer website... no response. Better ideas/contact info?

thanks for the post smoking hole. i do not know why anyone would intentionally look for ropiness... perhaps it is the next big thing?? =-)
 
I wonder if it's the ropiness itself that they are going for or what you get when the bonds have been broken. There are a lot of subtle flavors that are in some of the Belgium sour ales that I haven't tasted in the American counterparts. Sometimes I wish that I had gone for bio-chemistry instead of computer science so that I could study these things...
 
I sent an email through the brewer website... no response. Better ideas/contact info?

thanks for the post smoking hole. i do not know why anyone would intentionally look for ropiness... perhaps it is the next big thing?? =-)

For Vinnie? I'll PM you his email address if you need it. I contacted him through the RR website, and he got back to me within 2 days! The email was forwarded to him by a sales person. Pretty awesome company. :)
 
The beer is fine and pouring wonderfully now. Just tapped it a couple days ago. I'll have a review on my website soon. Whew.
 
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