Monastery Ale Yeast (funky?!)

[nicklawmusic]

I made a yeast starter for a Belgium Blonde using White Labs WLP500 (Monastery Ale Yeast).

It had 48 hours to start fermenting. When I opened it up to pitch into the fermentor, it smelled funky as!!! A kind of weird hybrid of cider with slightly sour/boarding on vinegar cover tones.

Is this yeast meant to smell like that or did I just pitch an infected yeast into my beer?

If it is infected, I can only put it down to one of two things:

1) I had to retrieve the stir bar from the flask as it was too heavy for the magnet so I boiled a smaller stir bar for 15 minutes and dropped that in.

2) There were some scorch marks on the bottom of the conical flask on the inside that I was unable to remove no matter how much I scrubbed with a bottle brush.

Any ideas if it sounds infected to you?

 

[nicklawmusic]

Also, should I be concerned that after 24 hours there's NO sign of fermentation?

 

[tagz]

I'm confused about your timeline. Did you wait 48 hrs to pitch or did it take 48 hours to start? If you waited 48 hours to pitch and it smelled sour and vinegar-like that doesn't sound good.

 

[Schmoltsbeer]

How far along fermentation is it? Some yeast throw wicked stench while they are in the throws of the feast (fermentation).

 

[nicklawmusic]

tagz: My starter was ferrying for 48 hours. So made the starter and pitched the yeast to it Wednesday, and pitched the yeast starter to the beer on Friday. So the starter was fermenting when it went into the wort on Friday.

Schmoltsbeer: Fermentation has now started on my main batch. The lag time has been 48 hours but it starting to bubble.