My turn to play the "do I have an infection" game

Ah, I swore I'd never do this, but I'm gonna have to ask: do I have an infection?



I'm not concerned so much with the little floaties, which I assume are normal yeast rafts, but there's a filmy spiderweb-like top covering the beer which you can kind of see in this picture. When you rock the bucket from side to side, you can see the beer moving underneath it and that's what has me concerned. Is this normal yeast behavior? As you can see, I have a bucket and not a carboy, so I'm still kind of feeling my way through things. I don't ever remember seeing this before, but then, this is only my second batch and I easily could've missed it the first time.

More info: it's a pretty basic kit Irish Red ale, checked the SG over the weekend and it was 1.012, which should be about it's FG. It's been in primary for almost three weeks, so I assume it's done fermenting. When I checked the gravity I did some sampling and it didn't taste sour at all, so if there is something wrong, I'm thinking I may have caught it early and I'm gonna bottle the sucker right quick and hope I can leave the crap on the top. Otherwise, I had planned to let it sit maybe another week.

So am I being overly noobish here? Or should I kick into action?

pic no workie..

Whoa.

Yah, thats possibly an infected batch. You said its weblike and its a "skin" that is sitting on top of the beer?

Bottling it now could cause bottle bombs as its likely that whatever this is, if it is an infection, would continue fermenting out in the bottle.

jiggs_casey said:

pic no workie..

Click to expand...

Should be OK now. URL changed on me for some reason.

And rats. I thought that didn't look good.

most of these threads end with "RDWHAHB", but you might have a problem there...

Yeah, that is 100% infected. I'd probably dump the batch and start over with better sanitation. Sorry!

bierhaus15 said:

Yeah, that is 100% infected. I'd probably dump the batch and start over with better sanitation. Sorry!

Click to expand...

Would that be ... not letting my wort chiller leak tap water into the beer? Not pouring beer down my arm and then into the fermenter? Not letting my yeast vial explode all over my hand and then down into the wort?

Heh. I have some leads as to where this may have come from.

Don't dump it just yet! Personally, I've never had an infected batch, but if I did, I'd rack it to a secondary and let it sit for a month or 2, and then see how it tastes. It could be really really delicious! Give it some time, especially if you have a secondary.

And yes, use better sanitation practices next time.

Yah, don't dump. Save it someplace safe, and see what happens. Or add a bunch of yeast, bottle, and as soon as it carbs keep it someplace near freezing and drink relatively quickly. Whatever floats your boat.

Uh ... yeah ... did I say Irish Red? I totally meant Flanders Red

Seriously, though, I haven't dumped it yet; I'm considering racking it into a secondary and just letting it roll for a while to see what comes of it (being the naturally curious type is how I ended up in grad school, I suppose) but I don't have a ton of apartment space or equipment since I'm just starting out. I'm just not sure I want to waste valuable space on something that I have no idea how it will turn out while I'm trying to build up my pipeline. Then again, I'm not sure I want to just throw beer out without knowing what will come of it.

As for sanitation, besides the previously mentioned incidents of spilling things over myself and into the beer, I also suspect that I could've done a better job cleaning my siphonless fermenter.

Ah, learning!

I dont understand the logic on this forum, that looks like crap, if I found out you served that to me you would be walking funny for a week. Its maybe 25 dollars worth of stuff and a few hours of time, I bet you had fun during that time too.
Id dump that in a heartbeat.

Does anyone have a guess as to what this might be? I've been scanning the infection threads (which is a terrible idea, I'm going to be paranoid for a while) and I don't see anything that looks quite like it. I think it's probably too early for brett and based on the taste I don't think it was lacto ... so what am I dealing with here?

It will take less fermentor-space than it will bottle-space. And keeping is better than dumping, even if you end up discarding it in the end.

The most makeshift things can be made into fermentation/storage vessels. I made a salt bucket into the primary fermenter for a Belgian Blonde this past winter. Worked fine.