Sponaneous Fermentation

[tgolanos]

I just brewed a wheat beer to mark my first full year of brewing and decided to wait overnight before pitching my yeast to let it cool to pitching temps. I missed my OG by quite a bit, so I added some Wheat LME (boiled and cooled before adding) this morning and planned on pitching the yeast this evening.

As I went to pitch the yeast, the airlock was bubbling away and there was a distinct kräusen already forming. My questions:

1. I followed all of my standard cleaning and sanitation procedures. I dropped a cleaned and sanitized freezer pack in to help cool the wort, though. I can only guess there may have been something on the freezer pack? For what it's worth, the fermentor says 25°C, but I tend to think that's just the air temperature (we've had some warm days) and that the beer itself is actually cooler than that.

2. It doesn't smell off or infected, in fact I think it smells fine. I'm going to let it ride because I'm intrigued now. Has anyone experienced this with a Weizen? If so, has it turned out drinkable? I have some rehydrated Mangrove Jack Bavarian Wheat yeast in the fridge ready to go if anyone thinks I should pitch it ASAP.

 

[Bali]

As far as I know there is a safe pH where no nasties can infect your beer, so I would sour my wort before leaving it to wild yeasts.

I had a recent bad experience with a dubbel gone wrong: the fat yeastcake was ok, IBU and pH and fermentation temperature also. However, I thought it would be fun to put some date puree in it (few minutes in boiling). Somehow it was not written on the packaging of the date that the fruit was preserved with mold-inhibitor chemicals (probably banned in the EU if not in Iran too), that killed all my yeast giving the smörgasbord of delicious sugars to harmful bacteria. It took only a few drop of tasting to have a very upset stomach daylong.
Be careful.

 

[spexicola]

I always find these stories interesting, in the fact that if one tried to reproduce them, say by dropping a few grains from a pack of S05 into a 5 gallon batch, there would be quite a long lag time before seeing activity. Yet sometimes even with sanitization procedures in place, the beer will act like it was pitched with cropped and active yeast.

This is not meant to cast doubt on the OP, as I myself have had a 7 bbl batch of wheat beer I worked on that had boiled blackberries added start a vigorous (blowing water out of the blowoff bucket) fermentation in under 24 hours while being left to cool before pitching.

 

[tgolanos]

I always find these stories interesting, in the fact that if one tried to reproduce them, say by dropping a few grains from a pack of S05 into a 5 gallon batch, there would be quite a long lag time before seeing activity. Yet sometimes even with sanitization procedures in place, the beer will act like it was pitched with cropped and active yeast.

This is not meant to cast doubt on the OP, as I myself have had a 7 bbl batch of wheat beer I worked on that had boiled blackberries added start a vigorous (blowing water out of the blowoff bucket) fermentation in under 24 hours while being left to cool before pitching.

Don't worry about sounding like you're doubting me. If anything I'm more intrigued by this new experiment. It's amazing that things that are boiled and theoretically sanitized still manage to find their ways to do their own thing with no human input.

 

[burninator]

Don't worry about sounding like you're doubting me. If anything I'm more intrigued by this new experiment. It's amazing that things that are boiled and theoretically sanitized still manage to find their ways to do their own thing with no human input.

In the words of Dr. Malcolm, life...uhh...finds a way.

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