Price check on Vagasil. Looks like someone's got a little too much cheese on the tac

Just racked my winter warmer to secondary. This is the first batch I have brewed since building my kegerator so i was psyched to get it going further down the line.

When I went to rack it, though, a huge dirty yeast smell came out of the primary. Ok, thats fine, theres crazy amount of trub. I get the siphon going for a bit, then extract some for a hydrometer reading. After I took the reading, I start the ritual smell/taste/swirl, but the reekage of yeast was still there. I tasted it and it seemed fine to me, though. Granted, I was drinking Sam Adams Imperial Pilsner a little while before this, so rotting cabbage might have tasted fine to me.

I dont want to have to hide this beer from my friends because it smells like the neighborhood's homeless man's belly button. Thoughts or suggestion on the situation?

If it helps to know, I used liquid White Labs California Ale Yeast, sans starter.

It's full of yeast.. of course it smells. I make the same mistake all the time. My last pale smelled rotten. A week in secondary (warm) and another week in cold cleared it up and got rid of the yeast smell/taste.

Why were you smelling a homeless guys belly button?

Sometims homebrew is like chees.

The more rotten it smells...the better it tastes.

You know, in retrospect, looking at that post, my bigger problem IS knowing what a homeless man's belly button smells like.

The things I do after one too many and the subversive suggestions of my 'friends'....

That's why we use a clearing step in the process. The yeast float until the fermentation is done. Also, higher finish gravities tend to slow the clearing.

Me, myself, and Irene. Great reference!

Whats a barley sandwich without a good Limburger?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburger_cheese

Cheers
BeerCanuck

"In 2006 a study showing that the malaria mosquito (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet[2] earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology."

That's fierce.

Hopleaf said:

"In 2006 a study showing that the malaria mosquito (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet[2] earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology."

That's fierce.

Click to expand...

That's spectacularly nasty. But meh, more info to file in the useless trivia portion of the gray matter.

Ize

hoppersailor said:

Me, myself, and Irene. Great reference!

Click to expand...

Ya, but wasn't it 'VagiClean' in the movie?

Once you get used to the smell you got it licked...time will cure it.

that yeast strain ferements with a sulphur-like smell, which is like rotten eggs or match heads. The smell always goes away in time though.