My Pretty Infection with PICS

True to form. Brewed 15 gallons, split it among 3 plastic buckets, dumped 3 different yeasts into it.

2 of the fermentations have my 'typical' infection. I am pretty sure it comes from my abudance of fruit trees on our family orchard. The 3rd fermenter has a new infection. In like 14 years of brewing I haven't seen this one. I have been playing with it since January, watching it get more and more obvious in my different brews. It was growing in a batch of yeast I have in store (WLP037) but this brew is using WLP038. I am thinking it has taken residence. The other two yeasts are WLP006 and WLP022. The WLP006 is from a jar of yeast I've refridgerated since last winter.

I'm thinking I'll keg all three and sit on them until the end of the summer. I brewed this up in late April and they all smell great.

Now to the pics.

Nasty! Ride it out brother!

Very interesting. You must have some species of Brettanomyces floating around among your fruit trees. Do you ever have issues with bottle bombs or excessive late formation of carbonation? Brett takes a long time to ferment out a lot of the dextrins that Saccharomyces can't handle.

Just for s**ts and giggles, you should leave one batch exposed to air for a little while after cooling and let it spontaneously ferment. It would likely be a very long-term fermentation but would give you an idea of what your terroir has to offer.

I haven't bottled in ages. But, when I was living in the city, I had a brewing season full of gushers; that was back before the invention of sanitation.

I did the an open ferment using an erlenmeyer flask and I ended up a with a white film forming. It wasn't a thick pellicle, like a sherry flor, but more of a film climbing the sides of the flask. It is a very similiar light white film in the photograph. It doesn't make the beer too sour overnight but after several weeks it can begin to make it unpalatable. I do notice a sometimes medicinal flavour that smells very similar to band-aids I suppose. I could be self-diagnosing, but my guess was Brett. for the orange and Lacto. for the white. It's neat to have two different infections running side by side at the same time.

I'd ditch the plastic buckets, and switch to glass. Easier to sanitize.

Very curious here. You make it sound as if this is a normal occurrence and even have an idea of where it’s coming from. Do you enjoy sour beers and let the brett do it’s thing, Belgian style, intentionally?

Kickass said:

Very curious here. You make it sound as if this is a normal occurrence and even have an idea of where it’s coming from. Do you enjoy sour beers and let the brett do it’s thing, Belgian style, intentionally?

Click to expand...

As to the question of my enjoying Belgians: On a recommendation, I purchased a four-pack of Allagash White last weekend. They are bottle conditioned; so, I'll probably grab a culture from them for safe keeping. I am considering giving the culture to the same man who recommended the Allagash, my brother. He has about dozen beehives. And, I imagine some mighty mead.

The infection probably originated from a load of apples I had been keeping over the winter in an unheated storage area. It is around that time that I noticed two things. The first being a subtle contamination extending from the very same yeast on the apples to an erlenmeyer flask and subsequently into a glass-carboy. In the carboy I noticed a subtle hint of orange-ness floating atop and, of course, a prolonged fermentation. I transferred the contents into a plastic bucket as a secondary. The original gravity had been 1.062 and the final gravity was 1.003. The beer itself was rather unpalatable at first, but in the ensuing weeks became one of the most unique brews I've made to date; something like butterscotch candies. Considering the grist consisted of a healthy proportion of wheat malt and crystal 10L, it had an expected sharpness and sweetness.

This time around, I am almost certain the plastic bucket itself is where the infection came from. Given the notoriousness of Brettanomyces and the age of the bucket with all it's little scratches, I suppose this is not a thesis that is all that off.

My main curiosity with posting the pics is to indentify if this is two different infections or rather two manifestations of the same culture.

I covered the three buckets and have stown them away for the Summer. Let's see what we get in the Autumn.

StAnthonyB said:

The beer itself was rather unpalatable at first, but in the ensuing weeks became one of the most unique brews I've made to date; something like butterscotch candies.

Click to expand...

Pediococcus is a distinct possibility; it is known to produce high levels of diacetyl in some cases.

The first one could be Acetobacter; I had one batch go acetic and it formed that sort of "skin" on the surface. If that's what it is you can pretty much stop it dead once you keg since it's an aerobe.

The second looks kind of normal. Lots of my beers have had those flocs floating around on the surface late in fermentation. Sometimes they don't even fall.

Neither screams "contaminated" to me, unless they definitively taste off in some way.