I think I have an infection in my mead

I don't have a good enough digital camera to capture this, so I'll try to describe it.

Its a white substance growing on the neck of the carboy. its about 2" above the liquid line of the mead.
Its hazy white all the way around, and then some spots are thicker, clumped up. It looks a lot like the petri dishes we infected with a mouth swab back in biology classes.

But, I followed my normal sanitizing habits with Star-san. I was trying to dismiss it as some sort of condensation from the CO2 and yeast...but I've not run into this on any past mead batches, so I'm worried.

yeast is SafAle s-33.

its been going about 3 weeks now, so I was thinking I might safely rack it to secondary a little early, suck up some of the lees so I keep actively fermenting and don't stress the yeast.

thoughts? opinions?

no ideas eh?

well I guess I'll rack it this evening, better safe than sorry.

really hard to say without a picture....it could be yeast. How does it taste? Smell?

well, i went ahead and racked it, but my new camera showed up so I did snap a picture before racking. it smelled ok, but it seemed like there was more crud building up in the neck so I just didnt' wanna chance it.

its been 20 hours and now i have no signs of fermentation so I hope I didn't stress my yeast too badly. I gave them some more yeast nutrient since I assume they'll be going through a growth phase again before it finishes. I did siphon up some of the yeast cake...apparently not quite enuf.

malkore said:

...its been going about 3 weeks now, so... ....its been 20 hours and now i have no signs of fermentation...

Click to expand...

Doesn't most of the fermentation in mead happen within two weeks?

it all depends. I've had active fermentation for 5 weeks before. this one was still bubbling until I racked it.