my bubbly tasteless infection - proposed solutions (with video!)

my breakfast stout has acquired some sort of infection - either bacterial or a wild yeast. after a month of stability and normal appearance in secondary, it spontaneously started fermenting again. tiny little bubbles started rising through the beer and would create large bubbles on the surface as they got caught in the oils of the brew (due to coffee, chocolate, etc). airlock peaked at 5 bubbles per second, and gravity dropped 12 points.

the beer doesn't taste horrible now, but this may be because it's hard to taste much given intensity of stout's flavors. it is slightly astringent but could be because of the ingredients: black patent, roasted barley, coffee, etc. the beer's body is getting thinner as one would expect with an infection that took me from 1.027 to 1.015. the predicted FG for this beer was 1.023, so we are well below what sacc can achieve. and it appears that we are heading lower:

i recently needed the fermenting vessel so i racked to a smaller tertiary carboy and bottled 15 bottles. i'm keeping an eye on the carboy, if gravity drops more than a few points i will be refrigerating & drinking those 15 bottles ASAP.

it appears that racking - i.e. exposing the beer to oxygen - kicks up fermentation. things had stabilized in secondary, or at least slowed way down, but after racking to tertiary the little bubbles appeared again. see video here: http://bit.ly/QB9QBQ (crank up the resolution to 480). the last 5-6 seconds contain the best view of the bubble rising up the neck of the carboy. remember, this brew is over 3 months old!

i fear that this infection will take the beer down to some ridiculously low gravity and leave behind nothing interesting. thus, in short order, i am considering one (or several) of the following solutions to kill whatever is in there and salvage whatever is left:

1) campden tablets: nuke with 1 tab per gallon, then let the beer sit for several weeks before re-yeasting and bottling.
2) heat: bottle, let carbonate, then pasteurize with heat by submerging the bottles in hot water. there are several threads on this board (like https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/easy-stove-top-pasteurizing-pics-193295/)
3) freeze: we've all had the experience of forgetting a beer in the freezer (beercicle). i'm thinking that a good freeze after bottling might kill whatever is in there. it should kill any wild yeast, at a minimum. not sure about the bacteria.

i could also let it run its course and wait for some ridiculously low FG (1.000 or less), but i'm concerned that the resulting beer will be too thin. currently it's still decent so i'm hoping to save what's left. maybe i can add some malto if i go the campden route.

all thoughts/comment appreciated. thanks!

I reckon you should wait it out,tasting at regular intervals and when it's steady over a few months, brew a fresh batch of stout with LOTS of body and blend it.

badlee said:

I reckon you should wait it out,tasting at regular intervals and when it's steady over a few months, brew a fresh batch of stout with LOTS of body and blend it.

Click to expand...

hi badlee,

thanks for your suggestion. the issue to keep in mind here is that the infection will still be in there even after FG and adding fresh beer = adding fresh food for the infection, so it'll get back to work and munch down on the new snack... and we'll be right back where i started, only with more infected beer.

however, your plan could work if i successfully killed the infection first, which only campden tablets might do. so i might just do that: give campden a shot, let that dissipate over a few weeks and then blend with a heavy body stout (maybe use a wine yeast that will leave a lot of complex sugars behind).

or maybe this isn't worth the effort anymore...

I'm not sure if you can remove a infection once it's in there.... I know campden will kill yeast but I don't believe it will kill bacteria though i could be wrong. I know though that the general consensus is once you have a infection drink it quickly before more off flavors become evident. the problem with all due respect to Badlee is that if you blend a infected batch with a non-infected batch is all you are doing is infecting the good beer. hmmmm.... I'm thinking hard about this and minus antibiotics ( which I don;t reccomend doing this ) I think you may be stuck. and your sure this is not your regular fermentation just re starting ? maybe it was stuck then just kicked back off again ?

Keg it, no problems. (except extra sanitizing after)

GUSHER.

My only bad infection.

Bottling is impossible.

it is not harmful or even bad tasting, but it keeps making gas.

Aschecte said:

I'm not sure if you can remove a infection once it's in there.... I know campden will kill yeast but I don't believe it will kill bacteria though i could be wrong.

Click to expand...

i had to look it up here, but according to the wiki and yooper, campden kills bacteria. so campden should work.

Aschecte said:

and your sure this is not your regular fermentation just re starting ? maybe it was stuck then just kicked back off again ?

Click to expand...

good question, it's something i've certainly considered and i'm pretty sure it's not for a few reasons: one, how the brew looks. if you take a look at the video, you'll see the distinct little bubbles rising up through the brew. i've never seen a normal sacc fermentation look like that. second, apparent attenuation is now at 82% and it's still going despite 8.75% ABV. US-05 isn't known for hitting 80%+ without some pretty major tweaking... and i haven't done anything to tweak this batch (multiple late sugar additions, oxygenation, heat ramping, etc). i guess there is some miniscule chance that i got a super-mutant version of US-05... but occam's razor tells us that an infection is the right way to point my suspicions. and finally, i had previously hit an FG that wasn't too far off of predicted (1.027 vs. 1.023), and given my recipe i expected to be on the high end.

cheezydemon3 said:

Bottling is impossible.

it is not harmful or even bad tasting, but it keeps making gas.

Click to expand...

unfortunately i don't have a kegging setup. so if i can't kill the damn stuff, i might bottle it, let it naturally carbonate, taste them regularly to determine when they are sufficiently carb'ed, then put them all in a fridge. hopefully the cold will stall the infection and prevent it from becoming more carb'ed. might be the excuse i need to get a beer fridge - a silver lining!

thanks for your insights. anyone else?

Chances are this is not going to taste any better than it does now. If you can keg, keg it. If you are going to bottle, heat pasteurize it.

sweetcell said:

unfortunately i don't have a kegging setup. so if i can't kill the damn stuff, i might bottle it, let it naturally carbonate, taste them regularly to determine when they are sufficiently carb'ed, then put them all in a fridge. hopefully the cold will stall the infection and prevent it from becoming more carb'ed. might be the excuse i need to get a beer fridge - a silver lining!

thanks for your insights. anyone else?

Click to expand...

Cooling does help, but I am pretty sure that even cooled, a few weeks later you have gushers.

That is the beauty of kegging it......it doesn't need Co2

I agree... If it doesn't taste bad drink it as fast as you can. Maybe time to have a party? lol

i guess i should clarify that by "doesn't taste bad", i mean it doesn't have any off-flavors due to the infection (at least none that i can identify). however, the underlying beer - a big oatmeal/chocolate/coffee stout - would certainly benefit from more aging. i guess i'll be drinking this one younger than i would have otherwise liked to. and time to re-brew!

(EDIT on 12/21/12: this post was made in the early days of dealing with this situation. initially there was little impact based on tasting gravity samples. eventually the stout did develop an off-flavor and it was actually kind of interesting - worked well with the roastiness. this infection has since hit other beers that weren't as robust and they suffered from it. please continue reading this thread for more info...)

always!

bombed it with campden tonight, 1 crushed tab/gallon. gave it a mix, foam rose up from the brew (CO2 was released due to nucleation)... and the continuous rise of small bubbles stopped. campden really is the nuclear option: appears to have killed everything immediately. next up is waiting a week or two for the sulfur to dissipate, then re-yeasting with champagne yeast, priming (maybe add a little malto), and bottle.

sweetcell said:

bombed it with campden tonight, 1 crushed tab/gallon. gave it a mix, foam rose up from the brew (CO2 was released due to nucleation)... and the continuous rise of small bubbles stopped. campden really is the nuclear option: appears to have killed everything immediately. next up is waiting a week or two for the sulfur to dissipate, then re-yeasting with champagne yeast, priming (maybe add a little malto), and bottle.

Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity what was your gravity before adding the campden ? did it drop anymore since your last post ?

Aschecte said:

Just out of curiosity what was your gravity before adding the campden ? did it drop anymore since your last post ?

Click to expand...

good question - gravity had not changed. four days after racking to tertiary the gravity was still 1.015.

i hesitated for a second before adding the campden, and maybe i should have waited. in the end i didn't because there was clearly still activity going on in the FV and i didn't want to wait to find out how much lower gravity was going to drop, as i'm fairly confident it would have. if it looked at all like a normal sacc fermentation i would have waited, but this didn't.

now the question is: what will aging do, if anything? is live (but dormant) yeast required for aging to have an effect? since i killed everything off, will the beer change at all over time? or are the changes purely chemical?

it's got a pretty strong alcohol taste (8.5% ABV) that i'm hoping will fade a little with time. i could get an alcohol-tolerant yeast like wlp099, make a starter, pitch at high krausen and feed it some sugar if live yeast was required for aging. thoughts?

quick update: campden didn't work. kept things quite for a day or two, but the bubbling started up again. eventually slowed down. i've bottled that batch and no bombs but it def has an unexpected taste. on the stout it actually complements the roastiness quite nicely. unfortunately the infection has shown up in my last few batches, and lighter beers don't fare well with this flavor. a belgian blond and a saison were rendered undrinkable. i threw some brett B into the saison, maybe the brett can do something interesting with the off-flavors.

i've tried replacing all my plastic once already, but i must have missed something because the infection has returned several times. maybe it's in the air. i will be replacing everything again this weekend. i've also just bought a pH meter to make sure my star san is up to snuff. if anything i mix it on the heavy side (i.e. add a touch more concentrate than called for) but that should only make the stuff even stronger.

Do you top up after boil?

something in the air could unfortunately be to blame. If you brew in a basement or garage, kitchen may be a necessary step.

cheezydemon3 said:

Do you top up after boil?

something in the air could unfortunately be to blame. If you brew in a basement or garage, kitchen may be a necessary step.

Click to expand...

no top up, i'm all-grain & full boil.

i mash in the kitchen, boil outside, and ferment in the basement. the basement air/dust could indeed contain something, but the beer gets very limited exposure to the air down there - close to none at all. would have to be something extremely virulent & powerful. i used to bottle in the basement, but after suspecting that the air there might be the problem i bottled the last batch in the kitchen - and it has the taste, not too strong but it's there. the empty bottles were stored downstairs prior to bottling, maybe the star san rinse before bottling isn't sufficient to kill the bug.

i'll be going full nuclear on my next bottling run: all new plastic, bleach everything including the bottles, extended soaks in star san, etc.

sweetcell said:

no top up, i'm all-grain & full boil.

i mash in the kitchen, boil outside, and ferment in the basement. the basement air/dust could indeed contain something, but the beer gets very limited exposure to the air down there - close to none at all. would have to be something extremely virulent & powerful. i used to bottle in the basement, but after suspecting that the air there might be the problem i bottled the last batch in the kitchen - and it has the taste, not too strong but it's there. the empty bottles were stored downstairs prior to bottling, maybe the star san rinse before bottling isn't sufficient to kill the bug.

i'll be going full nuclear on my next bottling run: all new plastic, bleach everything including the bottles, extended soaks in star san, etc.

Click to expand...

I have a feeling that it is something else.....

Is there any exposure post boil to anything that contacted the grains?

I am sincerely sorry to hear about your problems!!

I always chill with frozen tap water ice, and so top up with it effectively. So I am sloppy by some standards. Fortunately my water and habitat are forgiving.

So what is this flavor you are referring to?

jtejedor said:

So what is this flavor you are referring to?

Click to expand...

i wish i could describe it. it's not like anything i've tasted in any commercial beer (for good reason, i certainly wouldn't pursue this taste on purpose!). i'll drink one tonight and make a concerted effort to describe it. stay tuned.

also, are there any BJCP judges on here? i'd like to send a few bottles to judges to see if they can ID the off-flavor.

sweetcell said:

i guess i should clarify that by "doesn't taste bad", i mean it doesn't have any off-flavors due to the infection (at least none that i can identify). however, the underlying beer - a big oatmeal/chocolate/coffee stout - would certainly benefit from more aging. i guess i'll be drinking this one younger than i would have otherwise liked to. and time to re-brew!

Click to expand...

If you can't taste any off-flavors then I doubt it's infected. Just because you see weird things going on in the ferrmenter doesn't automatically mean it's infected. If it IS infected you would know by tasting it. Keep going forward in the process, treating it like any other beer and I bet it will be just fine.

EDIT: Oops - didn't see your other posts. Nevermind.

jkendal said:

If you can't taste any off-flavors then I doubt it's infected. Just because you see weird things going on in the ferrmenter doesn't automatically mean it's infected. If it IS infected you would know by tasting it. Keep going forward in the process, treating it like any other beer and I bet it will be just fine.

Click to expand...

that post saying that i couldn't taste anything was made early on, when this situation of mine was quite new. now that it's manifested itself in several batches, i can definitely pick out the off-flavor. that stout was the first time the infection popped up and it was robust enough to mask most of the off-flavor. more delicate beers like a saison and a belgian blond can't hide it. the off-taste appears to get worse with time in the bottle. the blond tasted fine in the bottling bucket, but a few weeks later the off-flavor was there.

thanks for your kind words of encouragement

jkendal said:

If you can't taste any off-flavors then I doubt it's infected. Just because you see weird things going on in the ferrmenter doesn't automatically mean it's infected. If it IS infected you would know by tasting it. Keep going forward in the process, treating it like any other beer and I bet it will be just fine.

EDIT: Oops - didn't see your other posts. Nevermind.

Click to expand...

That is wrong. Gusher, virtually the only infection I have ever had, is tasteless for a LONG time. I guess eventually it would change the flavor, but terminal problems usually pop up before then.