Interesting "bad batch"..... Need suggestions please!

Me and my buddy Gary came up with this recipe using smoked grains and were going to throw in some woodchips and let the beast ferment for a good amount of time, just to try and pull off some unique beer.... Primary fermentation was a success as far as I could tell, but we didn't measure gravity or anything so it was kinda just a "did that seem like 3 minutes since the last airlock bubble to you?" thing (at this time we didn't really care, we were new to brewing and wanted to get the ball rolling haha). So we put it in our secondary and locked it up.

Unfortunately, after he got drunk one night while I was away and his curiosity got the best of him, Gary pulled the airlock off, took a swig out of our brew, sealed it back up, and then put it back into the closet....... A month or so later when I checked on the beer there is this white hard stuff floating on top of it and I start to think it got infected and ruined back when he opened it up... At this point, school was starting and I was busy and just left the beer sit out in the hallway in the light and in the 90 degree weather and figured someday I'd just toss it out....

Fast forward to today, almost a year later. I've decided to brew up a new beer and want to get my equipment all cleaned up.. So I start emptying the beer that's been sitting this whole time, and realize that it smells damn delicious! Hahaha. Now that I can see it close up, it doesn't really look like the white floating debris was mold after all... Maybe dead yeast or something? So, after all this, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps this beer is still salvageable? We never did put the wood chips in. Maybe I should toss them in, let it ferment a bit longer, and give bottling a shot? The yeast was most likely killed off after sitting in the hot weather this whole time, so do I need to add some if I do bottle? Should I even bother at all? I have no clue if this is safe to bottle, haha.

So, does anybody have any thoughts? I'd really appreciate it. Thanks alot!


............And no, I'm not Gary. lol.

Welcome to HBT!

I wouldn't mess with it anymore than you have. If you think you want to drink it, rack it to bottling bucket with some simple syrup. Hydrate a 1/4 packet of yeast and put it in the bottling bucket, give it a gentle stir and bottle. Wait 3 weeks or so, chill, and drink it.

If you haven't yet, you might want to read http://wwwhowtobrew.com to make more beer using more traditional methods that don't require you to wait a year and abuse beer before you have a drinkable beverage.

No worries, I have a tastey looking IPA in the works and was just hoping that maybe I could still walk away with 5 gallons of beer a year after abandoning that batch haha. Thanks for your input. Guess maybe I'll work up the courage to give it a taste, after all, it smells really good still..... We shall see.

Flavor is really the test. There aren't any organisms that will damage beer without wrecking the flavor. You might want to add some yeast to ensure carbonation.

Well I tasted it and it seems to have survived somehow. I'll bottle it up and give it a try in a few weeks... Thanks for the input!