White stuff on the surface

[JanOgr]

Hello,
I just noticed that there is some white stuff on the surface of my brew. This beer is openly fermented with a wy yeast lambic for three days, another ten days in closed fermentation plus two more weeks with us05 (sugar added during fermentation). The brew tastes and smells as it should. Botteled it today and tried to leave all the white stuff behind. Should I be working? My theory is to bottle it and check it in one months time. If it tastes ok then I guess it is fine.

Please see the pics for more information.

 

[davejanssen]

So if I've got this right, the brew is about 4 weeks old and has lambic blend in it. Is that right? If so, I would open all the bottles and pour it back into a carboy. The lambic blend has a lot of micro-organisms that will attenuate farther than US-05 and they will need more than 1 month to do it. The white stuff was probably the beginning of a pellicle, which the yeasts and bacteria in the lambic blend can produce. A pellicle is a pretty typical part of lambic fermentations so it is nothing to worry about.

 

[JanOgr]

Thank you for the response. So if i age the beer in the bottles instead will that have a bad affect on the flavor?

 

[davejanssen]

I'm not sure about the flavor, but my worry is exploding bottles. As the brett and bacteria continue to ferment the longer chain sugars that the US-05 couldn't they will generate more CO2. And there will be enough for them to feed off of that your bottles have a good chance of exploding.

 

[davejanssen]

What sort of beer were you going for ehre? The tricky thing about the lambic blend that you used is that it has a more diverse mix of microbes which work at different speeds and on different components of your beer. For that sort of mixed fermentation you are going to want to allow more time (time frames of months to > 1 year) to finish working through everything.

If you wanted a bit of acidity and funk in a pale ale or something like that, you might want to try using a single strain of lactobacillus and a strain of brettanomyces. But even in that case you are going to want to wait longer than 4 weeks before bottling.