What's going with this beer?

[jday001]

Hi All,

Long time reader, first time poster. I've been enjoying this apricot IPA for a month or so now, but poured one this weekend and all of a sudden it looks like a hefeweizen. I started checking out the bottles and a lot of them look like this now:

Not all of them look this way and some have settled out more than others. Some look like they have a good 2-3 inches of trub in the bottom of the bottle and some like the pic above look like a lava lamp or a science experiment gone wrong. I drank most of the first one I found this way and it still tastes fine, but I'm a little wary of pounding them down or sharing. I probably have about a case left that look like this in varying degrees. Could I have just picked up a lot of trub while bottling or is something more sinister going on?

I racked from secondary to a bottling bucket before bottling, so there shouldn't have been very much debris in there at all. This beer had 2 oz of pellet hops and a can of the apricot puree from the homebrew store. Everything was sanitized meticulously with star san.

Note: the image rotated and I don't feel like going back and fixing it. The bottle is standing straight up in this pic, not on its side.

Thanks for any advice,
Jeff

 

[midfielder5]

Sanitized does not equal sterile, and sometimes the bad guys make it through. Are you saying that the first bottles were clear of the debris, and now the recent drinking bottles are becoming cloudy? Does it taste sour? (edit: I see you said it tastes fine)

It could be a bacteria that has taken over the beer (the time differential has allowed the colony to grow), or you got an uneven amount of trub/apricot during bottle transfer. Two to three inches is a lot of trub though!

If it tastes good now, I would cold crash them all (put in fridge) to settle the floaties and drink them fast.


good luck. And Welcome to HBT!

 

[midfielder5]

also, you could have not cleaned particular bottles as well as others, causing the disparity.

If the bottle is not clean, it cannot get sanitized.

 

[jday001]

Thanks for the replies. It did start out a little sour but was smoothing out with time. I just attributed it to the apricot flavor but now I'm wondering.

I've always been really careful with the cleaning/sanitizing process and even ran the bottles through a super hot sanitizing cycle in the dishwasher. I guess it's still possible, though.

The only other thing I can think is that I did have a bit of a cold on bottling day. Maybe I passed something into the beer? Didn't think that was even possible.

 

[day_trippr]

[...]The only other thing I can think is that I did have a bit of a cold on bottling day. Maybe I passed something into the beer? Didn't think that was even possible.

I'm pretty sure it isn't possible for wort to catch a "cold". A virus needs a compatible living host cell to reproduce, and I don't think yeast qualify.

Funny thought, though...

Cheers!