What is that horrible smell?!

[VikeMan]

I used a heterofermentative strain of Lactobacillus, so the gravity had dropped from 1.033 to 1.022 after a little over 72 hours of fermentation around 100F, which gave the US-05 a pretty low starting gravity to work with.

So...33% apparent attenuation. What strain did you use? I've never seen/heard of a drop anywhere near that big. Lance Shaner (Omega Labs) did experiments comparing the attenuation of various strains, i.e. WLP677, WLP672, Wyeast 5335, Wyeast 5223-PC, OYL-605 in a 1.037 OG wort. The highest apparent attenuation was 12%, with WLP677.

Given your seemingly unprecedented drop and the horrible smell, I kind of suspect there were other bugs along for the ride.

 

[worlddivides]

So...33% apparent attenuation. What strain did you use? I've never seen/heard of a drop anywhere near that big. Lance Shaner (Omega Labs) did experiments comparing the attenuation of various strains, i.e. WLP677, WLP672, Wyeast 5335, Wyeast 5223-PC, OYL-605 in a 1.037 OG wort. The highest apparent attenuation was 12%, with WLP677.

Given your seemingly unprecedented drop and the horrible smell, I kind of suspect there were other bugs along for the ride.

I just saw that this thread got new posts about 8 years after the initial posts.

If this is the brew I think it was, as far as I can recall, I ended up determining that the cause of the smell was butyric acid caused during the kettle souring. My guess is that Clostridium or some other kind of bacteria got into the wort before the kettle souring started and multiplied at that time. The one thing that's different from my memory is that in my initial post here, I say that it smelled bad but tasted fine. I remember it smelling bad and also tasting bad. It might be that it didn't taste bad initially but that it tasted really bad after the fermentation using regular beer yeast. Regardless, I do remember that I dumped this beer down the drain after fermentation was 100% done. I ended up making another Berliner Weisse about a year later that tasted amazing and I then made again, also without the bad smell or taste. I think it was just bacteria getting into the kettle. I'm always pretty paranoid about sanitization, so it might have just been bad luck.