Antibrewer
New Member
I spotted one in the woods yesterday and roped it like a cowboy. It put up quite a fight, but now I have it confined to a growler I filled with extra wort after over-sparging my mash tun. White layer of foam, smells like a sweet kind of cheese. I live in central CT, and it's pretty consistently below freezing, so it was probably just floating around my basement. Trouble is, I had an infected beer earlier under the same conditions and that one smelled horrible. I suspect what I have now may be a tamer type of yeast. I daresay it's a saccharomycete, but a compound microscope is sort of out of my price range. Are there any effective ways to determine what I'm dealing with without just throwing it into a batch and seeing what happens (potentially ruining everything)?