WTF is this?

[FireEmt37]

Im making a double IPA I've made many times before. This time I used a mesh bag for the dry hopping. I went to bottle today and had this stuff floating at the top of my fermentation vessel. The beer looked and smelled good otherwise. When I moved it over to the bottling bucket I was careful to leave it behind.

I'm thinking it's yeast or protein of some sort but not positive as I've never had it like this before. It definitely isn't clumped up hops or other trub.

Can anyone help identify this mystery substance?

View attachment 1488235424648.jpg

 

[FireEmt37]

Pic 2

View attachment 1488235447456.jpg

 

[FireEmt37]

Pic 3

View attachment 1488235482375.jpg

 

[kev211]

What yeast did you use? As a side note... Way too much headspace. Toying with an infection just with that headspace

 

[FireEmt37]

Wyeast 1056 American Ale.

Pic doesn't look.right for head space. It was a little over 5 gallons in a 6 gallon fermentor. Is that too much head space?

 

[kev211]

Usually not, but that looks like way more than 1 gal headspace. To me it just looks like yeast that has flocculated but hasnt fallen out of suspension. Have you tasted the beer?

 

[FireEmt37]

A small sample and it tasted fine.

 

[kev211]

Id say youre probably good. Whats the gravity? Can you cold crash and see if you can get that gunk to fall out?

 

[FireEmt37]

Believe the final gravity was 1.020. Bottled it and amhoping for the best lol.

 

[Sadu]

I had a pilsner do something similar, it had these big chunks that looked like brain matter. This was my first lager and I made a few mistakes, including struggling to keep the mash temperature and the boil was not the sturdy rolling boil I normally do.

Beer came out fine, better than fine actually. So long as the taste and smell is ok I think it's just clumped proteins or similar, leave it behind when you rack if you can.

 

[lasultana]

Did you use (too much) irish moss? Could be yeast clumps?

 

[FireEmt37]

Didn't use any Irish Moss

 

[lasultana]

Well I have no idea then. It surely looks like you used too much irish moss/whirlflock. But if you didn't use any...

A "too-much-moss/flock"-example
http://hobbybrauer.de/bilder/cfarrell/2014-08-11_UG_Oktoberfestbier_HG.jpg