Never seen an infection like this!?! what is this?

[ANewrBrewr]

Brewed a simple chocolate hef beer and after transferring into secondary this showed up! Never seen an infection with such a star shaped linear fashion. Can anyone positively identify this? I'd be happy to leave it to do it's thing and end up with a Berliner Weiss of sorts, but if it's bad then I'll keg it now!

Cheers!

 

[beergolf]

Some cool photos of infections here...enjoy

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/pellicle-photo-collection-174033/

 

[feinbera]

That thing looks like the freakin' eye of sauron. I recommend tertiary fermentation in the caldera of an active volcano.

 

[stru]

That's honestly one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a beer! No clue what it is, but I want one!

 

[chocotaco]

Yeech, looks fungal to me. I don't know if that's even possible, but when veiny structures start to form it screams fungus to me. 0/10, would not drink.

Edit: New theory: could be just a regular pellicle - if a bunch of CO2 gathered under the surface, bulging out the middle of the pellicle, and then the bubble burst, you could get an appearance like that. Not veins of bugs, but just the pellicle wrinkled up and folded on itself when it collapsed after being stretched out by the CO2 that bursted out of the middle.

Mind you, when I start using phrases like "bursted out of the middle" it still makes me not want to drink the beer.

 

[ubnserved]

You are allowing the alien starfish to begin population of earth. Kill it now before it is strong enough to get out of there and gets loose to infect all of our beers, rise up and wipe out humanity.

 

[ubnserved]

Take good pictures though. That is cool looking in a crappie way.

 

[MaddBaggins]

 

[krumb]

looks like you have some airlock or blowoff tube liquid get sucked back into the carboy and dripped in the center, causing that awesome looking pellicle.

 

[ANewrBrewr]

UPDATE-- So I ended up bottling this and forgot about it in my closet for about 6 months! After opening some up it was fantastic!!! Entered it into a comp. as a dunkelwiezen and took Silver!! Glad I didn't dump it! Cheers.

 

[m00ps]

They didnt take off points for it being sour? Im guessing it had to be soured by that point, right?

 

[ANewrBrewr]

They didnt take off points for it being sour? Im guessing it had to be soured by that point, right?

No it didn't really have any sour notes to it (surprisingly). However it did have some strong belgium ester like flavors, which is why I entered it as a dunkel and not as the intended hef. However this will be one beer that will be impossible to recreate! I'll dig up the scoresheet and post it.

 

[sweetcell]

However this will be one beer that will be impossible to recreate!

well, you could try pitching some of this infected beer into a similar fresh one, and hope that the infection takes hold again...