I've had that several times before in my secondary as well. I always get the weirdest looking beer when it comes time to rest in the secondary, and I always freak out, and it always ends up coming out fine. I usually just comfort myself by going and looking at pictures of REAL infected fermentations online
No! Recycle! Go to a bar on a sunday morning, ask them if you can take the bottles from the recycling bin (Most bars around here lock their bins), and you'll be set for the next few batches. Clean and delabel, and you'll be happy you did in the end. I dunno about you, but aside from the ***** that delabeling is (even with soaking the bottles in oxyclean for days), I still get great satisfaction when it's all done. Who pays for bottles these days, anyways?
) I always just guage my beer's maturity by tasting a small sample of it before going on to bottling/kegging.
By the time the beer is in secondary, it's beer: it has alcohol and a pH to not easily contaminate (and when it's in primary, it's expelling so much CO2, it's not getting much oxygen). Having some headspace is OK with beer. As for the OP, yeah, sometimes my secondaries get some bubbles, hops, yeast floaties, or a slight oil slick. It all turns out well...and if I've got floaties, they tend to drop down once I crash cool.
Whatever is on top of the conditioning beer is not much of an indicator of its health: if you're still worried about your beer, taste it! The only time I've had an infected beer, it was quite obvious from the smell/taste. But when it's in a carboy, I've noticed it's pretty hard to get an idea of what the color, much less flavor profile is like (not unless you have some special technique for tasting by not drawing a sample
I had actually been afraid of taking off the airlock and plug for fear of smell. I wanted to see what everyone else thought before I did that (denial anyone?)
