Mystery White Crystals on Fruit

[OldStyler]

Hey everybody,

I've encountered something of a mystery development in a fermenter of mine, and while I'm pretty much doing nothing about it I was wondering if anyone else had seen something similar.

I prepped a pretty standard 80% 2-row / 20% vienna malt grain bill with some light hopping and fermented it in a primary at 66 degrees F for a little over three weeks. I then racked into a secondary Better Bottle on top of 10lbs of frozen apricots, a pack of OYL's 'All the Bretts' and an oak spiral. Nothing notable happened in any of those processes, but after the fruit had risen to the top of the fermenter it started to develop a layer of white, crystalline looking 'dust' on top of them. It doesn't appear to be a mold, there's nothing fuzzy about the layer, it looks more like the fruit is simply dried out.

I've attached a couple pictures - my apologies for the poor quality. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? Could it be Brett working on the fruit in a CO2 dense environment?

Thanks as always for the help!

 

[RPh_Guy]

Pellicle?

 

[6midgets]

I've never seen that before. However i've always been told you shouldn't do any aging in a plastic fermenter because they allow too much oxygen in. That's a large head space as well. Could this be some kind of extreme oxidation?

 

[DrKnow]

If it’s not moldy and doesn’t smell bad, it’s probably ok. Best practices are to “punch down” your fruit with some sort of tool (spoon etc) or swirl the carboy daily to keep the top of the fruit submerged/wet until fermentation stops and there is no more co2 to push it up. Personally I like to also purée any fruit that I possibly can. It seems to extract the flavor quicker. Although there are exceptions to this like cherries with pits. Those I just mash up a bit with a potato masher.

 

[OldStyler]

That's what I was thinking, there is no foul smell coming from the airlock so it is likely some funky fermenting action. I had actually punched the fruit down once before and given it a bit of a swirl to wet the fruit. I was hesitant to keep doing so based on my theory that the low oxygen head space was important to maintain and that if it didn't smell bad it probably wasn't hurting anything. I thought about the puree technique, but for some reason in my head I was dead-set on using whole fruit - who knows why though, I probably read something somewhere - you know how that goes with brewing.

I open it up in about another month for bottling - I'm 90% sure it won't kill anybody...

Thanks guys

 

[Miraculix]

Hey everybody,

I've encountered something of a mystery development in a fermenter of mine, and while I'm pretty much doing nothing about it I was wondering if anyone else had seen something similar.

I prepped a pretty standard 80% 2-row / 20% vienna malt grain bill with some light hopping and fermented it in a primary at 66 degrees F for a little over three weeks. I then racked into a secondary Better Bottle on top of 10lbs of frozen apricots, a pack of OYL's 'All the Bretts' and an oak spiral. Nothing notable happened in any of those processes, but after the fruit had risen to the top of the fermenter it started to develop a layer of white, crystalline looking 'dust' on top of them. It doesn't appear to be a mold, there's nothing fuzzy about the layer, it looks more like the fruit is simply dried out.

I've attached a couple pictures - my apologies for the poor quality. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? Could it be Brett working on the fruit in a CO2 dense environment?

Thanks as always for the help!

View attachment 579750 View attachment 579751

This is yeast growing in the surface of the fruit. Just give out a squirrel once in a while and keep going

Edit: Hahaha I'll keep the auto correct mistake above. So hand out that squirrel!



....I meant "give it a swirl from time to time".

 

[505-Brewer]

This is yeast growing in the surface of the fruit. Just give out a squirrel once in a while and keep going

Edit: Hahaha I'll keep the auto correct mistake above. So hand out that squirrel!



....I meant "give it a swirl from time to time".

This. Yeast growth. Bring on the squirrels! [emoji12]