Film on beer?

I brewed a beer and all seemed well when i racked to secondary but now i'm getting ready to bottle and there's a strange white film on top of the beer. You guys think I'm infected? What do you think I should do? It doesn't seem to smell abnormal.

How soon after you pitched you yeast did you rack to secondary? I think you racked too soon and you you have fermentation still going on and it is making a krauzen...and I definitely would not even consider bottling unless you want bottle bombs.

Did you use your hydrometer to tell you when to move it to secondary? DId you take 2 readings over three days to see if the gravity was staying the same?

If I'm right and you racked too soon...then I would leave it alone for at least 2 weeks...

yeah i would worry about that but i left it for a couple weeks before racking because fermentation was a bit slow. Gravity now is my expected FG.

It sounds like mold growing on the top. You'll probably just fine with gently racking out from under the mold, leaving all that white stuff behind.

Dougan said:

yeah i would worry about that but i left it for a couple weeks before racking because fermentation was a bit slow. Gravity now is my expected OG.

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I've still seen krauzens form after racking even if it's been a couple weeks in ther primary before racking...just the act of agitating the beer kicks the yeasties into gear...The other normal film I have seen happens druing dry hopping...the oil from the hops trap rising co2 and forms a scary looking, but still normal film. Were you dry hopping?

Did you have a rise in temperature? That could kick the yeasts a bit as well.

Take some pics so we can see it. Honestly without good pics anything anyone here says will just be conjecture...

the foam's kind of everywhere because of me moving it. It was originally just a small film on the very top.

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From that angle to me it just looks like fizzy yeast colonies that sometimes get kicked up from the bottom with the co2...they come to the surface and fizz around a bit...But like I said, it really is hard to tell...

If it tastes and smells fine..then rack under it at bottling time...

I can see why you think that by the picture-- it's not really that great of a picture, though. The film itself looks a lot like pictures of infected batches I've seen when I googled it. I definitely don't know what I'm talking about but just based on the pictures I've seen I really think it's the same thing as what I saw in those pictures.

I racked under the film into my bottling bucket and tasted a sample. It tasted as I expected the batch to turn out when I brewed it. So I bottled it with my normal bottling sugar... and put all the bottles in a plastic bag and put that plastic bag in a plastic bin which now resides in my bathroom . We'll see how it turns out. Thank you for the input guys.