floating lumpy stuff in secondary?

[discoross]

Hi all,

I'm about a week and a half into secondary for a DIPA. All activity went from minimal to zero, so I opened it up to take a hydrometer reading. Reading was what I expected (done), it looked and smelled fine, but there was this lumpy brown/yellowish clumpy stuff on top. It looked like floating coagulated flour and smelled like estery sweetness. We had a heat spell here, so being concerned about esters from hot fermentation I removed it from the top with a sanitized spoon.

The taste is different from when I began secondary, but there was no hop bag at that point, and the flavors could have changed on their own.

Any idea what the lumpy stuff is? I attached a pic. The hop bag still had a solid knot and didn't let any leaves out. Hearing it's not an infection would put my mind at ease.

I'll be bottle conditioning whenever I get around to cleaning bottles, maybe tomorrow.


(click for big)

 

[Grizzlybrew]

it most likely is the yeast doing something weird. Tasting may be the only way to find out - I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

[Runyanka]

I would taste it to make sure there is nothing going on, then if it is good and your still skeptical, bottle, once carbed, put in the fridge to put those fears to bed. Most likely like Grizzlybrew said, its probably yeast colonies doing something funky. I had a wheat beer that the yeast would not settle out of, even in the secondary for 3 weeks.

 

[djinn88]

I've read on this forum about "yeast rafts," which I assume are pieces of yeast that come up from the bottom for no good reason. I would suspect that the heat spell you speak of is the cause of the yeast raft only because extreme heat brings up muck from the bottom of lakes around where I am. Analogy too extreme? IDK, but I wouldn't worry about your beer especially if the taste was okay when you sampled to FG.