help identifying this (bacteria?) and can my beer be saved?

not sure what the hell this is. My beer smells cidery and is much darker than what i thought it would be. My main concern is this white, stringy, frothy layer.

Yikes! That doesn't look good. Hope you can salvage the brew man. Have you tasted it? If it doesnt taste bad maybe you can rack it from under it.

Ouch. Maybe it will turn into cheese.

How long has it been like that? How long fermenting?

passedpawn said:

Ouch. Maybe it will turn into cheese.

Seriously, I'd dump it already. I know I'll take some heat for this comment, but life's short.

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Mmmm... Cheese....

Take a sample from beneath the top and see how it tastes before deciding to get rid of the batch!

It almost looks like a moss, maybe its a new form of moss... Antarctic moss.

If that batch already smells like cider, it's unfortunately dump worthy. I had a 10 gallon batch that I opened to take a gravity reading on and didn't close the lid completely. After a few days that stringy white-ish stuff formed, not as much as the batch you have there but it still appeared. You can taste the beer to see if it's ok but mine had that cidery smell and ended up with a very sour cider taste that was pretty off putting. Infected yeast from something in the air or something that didn't get completely scrubbed out of your fermenter. Or just keg it and slap a Spiderweb sour ale lable on it and roll with it. Good luck!

It looks like a pellicle. But then again I've brewed beer and had very odd looking yeast flocculation that also looked like a pellicle. Leave it alone and see what happens. If it doesn't start to smell/taste like Satan's Anus.... then you're probably okay.

My .002

Homebrewtastic said:

It looks like a pellicle. But then again I've brewed beer and had very odd looking yeast flocculation that also looked like a pellicle. Leave it alone and see what happens. If it doesn't start to smell/taste like Satan's Anus.... then you're probably okay.

My .002

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Guess it's not worth very much haha

Post this in the lambic/wild brewing section. Maybe someone there will have more input. This definitely looks a lot like many pictures I've seen of pellicles.

Have you pulled any beer from underneath for a taste? It could be any number of things depending on what it tastes/smells like.

Wow.

How long was the beer in that bucket? Lambic brewers will wait months to have a pellicle like that, and that's with intentionally infecting their beer!

Taste it, if ok, package, or leave it for a year. Could be a neat sour.

took a sample off the tap at the bottom. tastd way too sour and the beer was pretty dark. i dumped it down the drain, bleached the bucket twice. this beer was in a tertiary for 12 days. it was fine before i racked it.

kegtoe said:

took a sample off the tap at the bottom

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That would be the first thing you should stop doing. While some people say it's OK to ferment in a plastic bucket with a spigot, there are far too many places for nasties to hide in there. Plastic spigots are notorious for harboring bacteria.

yep very sour, dumped , it tripple bleached the bucket

kegtoe said:

took a sample off the tap at the bottom. tastd way too sour and the beer was pretty dark. i dumped it down the drain, bleached the bucket twice. this beer was in a tertiary for 12 days. it was fine before i racked it.

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I agree with NorCalAngler. I would encourage you to stop fermenting in bottling buckets or at a minimum not to use the spigot unless you are preparing to empty the beer out in its entirety.

All it takes is a drop or two of wort or beer left on that spigot or trapped on the inside in the turning mechanism to catch some lacto. Then the lacto gets in the beer and starts chewing on the residual sugars. Next thing you know you have that.

I would suspect that since you said this was a tertiary fermentation that you have had this beer sitting around fermenting for at least a few weeks. You probably got the lacto in the beer for a while and it took over the batch during those 12 days it sat in silence.