Floating debris

[slimreturns]

Hey guys this is my first post and I am kind of new to homebrewing. My first two batches of partial grain beers are fermenting (1 week along) as we speak. I used the recommended mesh bag to mash, and again to further filter when pouring into the carboy. As I will be dry-hopping another 2.5 oz of centennial into my IPA tonight, I noticed there is a lot of floating debris on the surface of the beer. What should I do about this? I am unable to do anything at really low temperatures just so you know.

 

[kombat]

A picture would help. It's possible the "floating debris" you're seeing is just yeast rafts and other remnants of krausen.

The thing that concerns me is that you said you filtered the cooled wort with the same bag you mashed with. Did you mean literally the same bag, or another identical bag that's only ever been used to filter chilled wort? If you used the same bag, how did you clean it after mashing and before you filtered the wort through it?

The reason this concerns me is because the grains you used to mash with are completely contaminated with bacteria. One of the main purposes of boiling the wort is to sanitize it and kill as much of that bacteria as possible, so that the yeast can establish itself as the dominant organism in the wort/beer. If you ran your cooled wort through that (contaminated) mesh bag, then it's likely that you've infected your beer.

 

[slimreturns]

No it was a seperate sanitized bag. I think its option 1, but I never experienced this with liquid extract brewing.

 

[kombat]

Thanks, that helps a lot. It looks fine to me. RDWHAHB.

 

[slimreturns]

Thanks. I'm using this practically tranparent plastic carboy (used for kimchi or other Korean pickling) and I guess I'm being more concerned because I can see everything.