@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!