TheEthanRiddle
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I have never a seen anything like that in my beer. Is it a goner? It has been in secondary for 5 days.
I am relaxed, I am enjoyjng a homebrew, but is this infected?
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if that white, spidery stuff on top isn't light refraction, I'd say yeah that looks like the start of an infection. who knows about whether it's a goner or not. give it a couple more days, see if the film gets worse, taste and rack from underneath I guess.
It does look similar to some of the infections you will find in the wild brew section of this site. It looks kinda like a red ale/brown ale. If so you may want to try a Belgian Sour or 2. Monks Cafe is a good choice. You may find that the words "goner" will be something that becomes a foreign concept. If you like the sours and your patient you could have a pretty good brew on your hands.
hard to tell, you might want to give it a little more time - then post another pic here.
do you like sour beers? there is a change that you've got something good going there! or, it could be gross. TBD.
for future reference: you have a lot of headspace in that secondary. a secondary should be filled all the way to the neck, so that there is very little air and very little surface area. in primary, the headspace is flushed with CO2 so there is nothing in there. after transfer to secondary there is air in the headspace - which can contain all sorts of bugs.
do you like sour beers? there is a change that you've got something good going there! or, it could be gross. TBD.
for future reference: you have a lot of headspace in that secondary. a secondary should be filled all the way to the neck, so that there is very little air and very little surface area. in primary, the headspace is flushed with CO2 so there is nothing in there. after transfer to secondary there is air in the headspace - which can contain all sorts of bugs.
TheEthanRiddle
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Could you link me some reading on turning an infected beer into a sour beer/lambic? I have never heard of this before.
Infected? Looks like it to me. Goner? You won't know till whatever got in there is done doing whatever it's doing. As for reading, check out the wild brewing section here on HBT. I'd say what you posted looks like wild yeast (brettanomyces) to me, though it's a very blurry pic and appears to be pretty early in it's formation. My vote would be for stashing that carboy in a closet for a few months and seeing what you end up with, it could be good.
TheEthanRiddle said:
You don't have to do anything, the beer made itself a sour or a lambic (maybe), though if you want to pick up a copy of "Yeast" by Jamil Zainasheff and Chris White (of white labs) you will have all the info about fermentation you'll ever need.
What you have in your fermenter could be one of three things: Brettanomyces (which are a form of 'wild' alcohol tolerant yeast), lactobacillus (also a form of wild yeast), or some other vicious bacteria.
Lacto and Brett are carefully used in many many styles (small amounts of Brett is actually a cornerstone in many truly traditional English brown ales and bitters) so if that was the recipe you began with your beer is certainly not a goner.
You have a few options here:
1) you accept that the cosmos gave you a different beer than you planned on, put it in a closet and let it do its thing (this honestly has yielded poor results for me in the past but most amazing things are happy accidents)
2) you play yeast police, sanitize a long spoon and carefully scoop all that spiderwebby stuff and throw it in the garbage (or a 1L starter :O) and hope that this riff raff only raised a little ruckus in your gated beach yeast community
3) you dump the beer and give up all hope.
Now I hope option 3 was eliminated the moment you read it. No beer, no matter how gross tasting, will hurt you. May the force guide your choice and definitely report back with tasting notes!
if it is indeed brett that you have in there, it won't sour so much as go funky. brett can give all sorts of flavors, from fruity to pure funk (leather, barnyard, "horse blanket", etc).
so i think you have 3 choices:
- if it tastes good now, drink it ASAP before the bugs in there have time to do much (and dump it if it tastes bad)
- leave it alone for a few months, and hope that whatever is in there makes something tasty
- pitch some bugs. if it's going to sour/funk anyways, might as well make sure that some or most of the bugs are known to produce good beer.
so i think you have 3 choices:
- if it tastes good now, drink it ASAP before the bugs in there have time to do much (and dump it if it tastes bad)
- leave it alone for a few months, and hope that whatever is in there makes something tasty
- pitch some bugs. if it's going to sour/funk anyways, might as well make sure that some or most of the bugs are known to produce good beer.
Ostomo517
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Whats the original beer? If its a brown ale your probably in for a tart treat!
TheEthanRiddle
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I am liking the idea of leaving it alone for a couple of months and seeing what happens. It was originally a belgian dubbel. Link posted below. So is it basically impossible to get sick by consuming infected beer? How will I know if it is Brett?
http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...d-edition-extract-kit-w-specialty-grains.html
http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...d-edition-extract-kit-w-specialty-grains.html
Magic8Ball
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+1 on "let it do its thing for a few months in a closet". Besides there is nothing better to impress visitors with than an infection in your closet. Come to think of it, I think I might have had an infection in a closet in college too. But that is a different story entirely.
Ostomo517
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No pathogens that can harm you can live in beer, I would suggest reading up on it and having a beer or two that have it so you can recognize the flavors.
BiologistBrewer
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Just let it go. To be honest, I might suggest once the yeast start really growing you try and swirl around your fermentation and get the cobwebs into your beer. Why do you ask? Yeast are increadibly resillent and ferocious creatures. They live in environments that most bacteria cannot survive due to yeast being eukaryotic and they usually completely overwhelm any other nasties you find. Your yeast may be able to take care whatever is brewing up in that attic.
I like the idea of pitching some known bugs and wilds. Preferably a Flemish blend.
Considering the base beer, I firmly second SweetCell's idea of pitching some bugs into this. That way you have good populations of bugs/Bretts that are known for turning Belgian ales into tart and funky treats. Without a microscope and a biologist, you don't know exactly what's forming in there now. It does (in my limited experience) look like a wild yeast of sorts. There's no telling the flavors it'll produce until the beer ages on them. could go either way. Pitching something like Roselare (Wyeast) or Flemish Blend (wlp) will give you species of brett, lacto and pedio that are known to make great beers. I say do that, and in a year you will have you first, albeit unintentional, sour ale. :rockin:
an alternative to buying a pack of yeast is to buy a sour/brett'ed beer (that isn't pasturized) and dump in the dregs.
+1 on pitching the dregs. Monks Cafe, and Petrus aged red ale are two great examples and have nice dregs you can pitch into the beer. I have the Monks Cafe dregs on a red ale right now. The smell at the 1 month mark in the secondary is amazing. + you get the chance to "try" a sour beer. In the event you taste 1 or 2 and find you absolutely hate them you can dump it and move on to the next beer. Either way I would suggest, when the beer comes out of the carboy, I would use bleach and hot water and let that soak for a while. Rinse the heck out of it. Then use starsan to finish off.
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