Golden Ale- possibly infected?

Ive been having some problems with a recent brew.

I brewed a golden ale recipe from my LHBS (my seventh overall batch). About the 2nd week I started to notice some scum looking white substance forming on the top. Over the next week it began to grow. After some some reading on HBT I had deduced that it couldn't be an infection because all new brewers think they have infections when they really don't, and 99% of the time their brew is just fine, and I would be just another "noob" if i thought i had one too. So after three weeks in the primary, I added my priming sugar and bottled, but the beer started to smell a little sour. I just opened one up after one week in bottles and there is no carbonation whatsoever, and the beer tastes even more sour. In addition there are these little white flakes floating in the beer that look like the spawn of my floating "infection" or whatever it was.

My question is: if there is an infection in my brew, is there a chance that it could mellow out, or that the yeast could "take over" and make the beer taste right again?

Or is there any explanation as to what could be causing my beer to act this way?

Some info about the brew/ my process:
Extract
OG: 1.046
FG: 1.012
Primary: 3 weeks
no secondary. When I bottle I just dump my boiled priming sugar into the carboy, mix, let settle and bottle with a siphon straight out of the carboy into my bottles.

Thanks for any help

PS: I know that three weeks is the preferred minimum time to let a beer bottle carb. I plan on letting this beer sit for at least that long before taking drastic action

Sour is generally not good. Do you have any pix of what the beer looked like when you thought it was infected?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words..

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/post-your-infection-71400/


That's a good thread with a lot of pics of nasties growing in beer, you can see if any of those look like your nasty.

No pics. I should have taken one, but it looks similar to some of the ones posted on that thread, espescially the white crusty ones. Thanks for the link.

Beer not carbing after ONLY one week is only an indication of another noob issue called impatience. And sour smelling could also simple be the noob propensity to sniff co2 gas which often has a little sour smell as well, if it hasn't fully incorporated into the solution yet, which is usually what is going on after only 1 week in the bottle, and thinking the beer is infected, when it really isn't.

The 3 weeks at 70 degrees, that we recommend is the minimum time it takes for average gravity beers to carbonate and condition. Higher grav beers take longer.

Stouts and porters have taken me between 6 and 8 weeks to carb up..I have a 1.090 Belgian strong that took three months to carb up.

Temp and gravity are the two factors that contribute to the time it takes to carb beer. But if a beer's not ready yet, or seems low carbed, and you added the right amount of sugar to it, then it's not stalled, it's just not time yet.

Everything you need to know about carbing and conditioning, can be found here Of Patience and Bottle Conditioning. With emphasis on the word, "patience."

ooops, looks like while trying to not look like a typical nervous noob, you come off looking like a typical IMPATIENT noob.

I betcha in another 3 weeks when you NEXT crack a bottle, you are gonna feel really silly for having started this thread....Just come back and update that everything is fine, so other noobs will have another example of unecessary worry to make them feel more confident.

Well, you were right, just cracked one at 15 days and it is pretty well carbonated. I suppose I learned my first lesson in patience. I'm mostly relieved that I won't be dumping 5 gallons of beer.

On a side note- I had thought that I would prefer kenning so I bought the equipment to set it up right away. (I had scored a free mini fridge and corney keg) well my fridge pooped out so I bought a capper and started bottling... To be honest I don't think I will go back... I love giving my beer away, and bottling is much more conducive to this.
It's just the waiting that sucks......

ziplinedown said:

Well, you were right, just cracked one at 15 days and it is pretty well carbonated. I suppose I learned my first lesson in patience. I'm mostly relieved that I won't be dumping 5 gallons of beer.

On a side note- I had thought that I would prefer kenning so I bought the equipment to set it up right away. (I had scored a free mini fridge and corney keg) well my fridge pooped out so I bought a capper and started bottling... To be honest I don't think I will go back... I love giving my beer away, and bottling is much more conducive to this.
It's just the waiting that sucks......

Click to expand...

Glad it works out, it almost always does. What makes you think kegging is going to make you beer taste good any faster? If you ask any experienced brewer who kegs, you will find that they too often leave their kegs at room temp for about the same time (three weeks or so.) Usually if they have a pipeline it happens automatically while they are waiting to kick a keg, but many do it out of hand.

A green beer is going to be a green beer regardless of whether it is in a bottle or a keg, if it needs to condition it's gonna need time as well.

All a keg does is make the beer carbed faster, but that's only half the process.

A lot of new brewers are drinking green beer, but eventually they figure it out and let theirs condition as well.

Revvy said:

Glad it works out, it almost always does. What makes you think kegging is going to make you beer taste good any faster? If you ask any experienced brewer who kegs, you will find that they too often leave their kegs at room temp for about the same time (three weeks or so.) Usually if they have a pipeline it happens automatically while they are waiting to kick a keg, but many do it out of hand.

A green beer is going to be a green beer regardless of whether it is in a bottle or a keg, if it needs to condition it's gonna need time as well.

All a keg does is make the beer carbed faster, but that's only half the process.

A lot of new brewers are drinking green beer, but eventually they figure it out and let theirs condition as well.

Click to expand...

Interesting stuff.

I'm about to keg my first batch, I've noticed that all instructions for carbing tell you to get the keg to serving temperature before transferring as temperature makes a big difference in the level of carbonation.

What does this mean for my kegging I'll be doing? I have left it in secondary for almost three weeks if that helps.