Infection - Is there still hope?

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stuknkrvl

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Brewed a batch of beer Friday. Had trouble cooling it, so transferred it in to my sanitized carboy and stashed it to let it cool. Life got in the way, and now here I am late Sunday night with my yeast starter all primed and ready to go, but there are several very obvious white colonies forming on the top of my wort.

Is it too late to salvage? I have a two step yeast starter over a liter in size that's ready to go, but I'm worried it won't be enough to choke out the bacteria and do it's thing.

Thanks.
 
Pitch the yeast, see what comes out! You may have a good wild yeast r bacteria or a bad... let it ferment a week or two and give it a taste(remember flat uncarbed beer can taste off!). Why waste the ingredients! You may have gotten lucky and will turn out a nice wild fermented ale!
 
If you are sure that the starter is infected I'd like to toss it and pitch something else
 
@Nico93 - The colonies are in my carboy, not in my yeast starter.

@MaryB - I'll give it a whirl!

Keep you all posted.
 
What style is it? Wild infections are usually souring bacteria, certain styles of beer lend themselves to sours much more than others

That being said, I've salvaged a couple by adding additional souring microbes to weird beers I had going. Though granted, I wasn't 100% certain it got infected, the sample just tasted "off" to me. The chances arent great, but its defintiely possible to salvage it. If it does end up developing a pellicle or coming out sour, id definitely toss some dregs in there that contain brettanomyces
 
@m00ps - It's an amber ale, all grain (can post the recipe if you're interested), OG 1.041. Last night I saw some very small white dots on the top of the wort in my carboy, and they were bigger and more numerous this morning, so clearly something growing in there.

Just before I pitched my yeast (WLP005 Brit ale, two step starter, approx. 1200 ml heavy slurry - didn't check to see how much of a cake settled out, just took it from the stir plate to the wort) I took a smell of the wort. It was sort of dank and musty, almost mold-like.

I've never intentionally brewed a sour beer, and I've never had any kind of bacterial infection (at least not that was noticeable enough to ruin a batch), so I don't have the first clue what kind of odor a pellicle would give off.

Guess we'll see how it turns out. Either way, I'm back to the drawing board with this one, big time. So many things went wrong with this brew. Didn't source my water right (rookie mistake - thought I had RO water, was actually "sourced" from some city in North Carolina and purified, i.e. filtered and minerals added for taste) so all my water mods were for not, couldn't get it cooled low enough fast enough (again, completely my fault for not being well prepared), and worst of all I'm still having an unbelievably hard time hitting my numbers right.

At the risk of highjacking my own thread, do you use BeerSmith2? I love the simplicity of the program itself, but I'm doing something wrong, which I suspect is an error in setting up my equipment profile for calculated water/wort/trub losses and for my efficiency as well. This recipe had a target OG of 1.053, but only hit 1.041, and that's even after extending my boil from 60 to 90 minutes because I thought my preboil gravity of 1.035 seemed a bit low for where I was hoping to land.

Any advice on that whole situation would be very much appreciated as well. Thanks!
 
I think you are worrying too much. Go get a beer.

Sometimes accidents turn out to be pretty good. Take my son for example......

Give it time. you may be surprised.

All the Best,
D. White
 
@dwhite60 - Not so much worried as shooting for repeatability. It'll be beer one way or another.

By the by, I have three kids... only one was planned. I feel ya.
 
Of that much I'm aware. So far so good. Nice pillowy krauesen, smells fine over the air lock. Only question at this point is whether or not I'll be proud enough of it to share. Either way it'll make a good excuse to go back to the brew store!
 
Highly unlikely but it might be the most delicious unrepeatable beer you've ever made hahaha.

I have one of those. A beautiful smoked honey ale that I tried to make again but no luck. The ingredients were all old things lying around and I didn't have a weight on any of them.
 
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