AerationStation
Well-Known Member
So I decided to do a forced wort test on my pale ale last weekend. Bad news is it failed, but what's growing in there doesn't look like bacteria.
I autoclaved the mason jar for the sample (autoclave from work) and poured in the wort straight from the kettle then covered with sanitized foil.
The pics below are about 10 days in (sorry for the quality), this looks like a Krausen and it looks like there is a cake on the bottom there. I took a sample and it tastes pretty peppery with some other phenol notes in there, but it's not bad. Maybe some acetone taste too.
I've read that truly "wild" yeast don't really floc (it's supposed to be a mutation due to selection by brewers) so I'm thinking it could be cross - contaminated but it doesn't seem like any yeast I've used in the past.
The biggest suspects would be wlp500 or wlp550, which are the only yeast that I use that would produce that phenol taste (I don't really brew a lot of Belgians or hefs)
My question is does anyone have any advice on how to ID the yeast to know if it's cross contamination from a known brewing yeast or a new cool house strain (seems super unlikely but it'd be pretty neat)?
I autoclaved the mason jar for the sample (autoclave from work) and poured in the wort straight from the kettle then covered with sanitized foil.
The pics below are about 10 days in (sorry for the quality), this looks like a Krausen and it looks like there is a cake on the bottom there. I took a sample and it tastes pretty peppery with some other phenol notes in there, but it's not bad. Maybe some acetone taste too.
I've read that truly "wild" yeast don't really floc (it's supposed to be a mutation due to selection by brewers) so I'm thinking it could be cross - contaminated but it doesn't seem like any yeast I've used in the past.
The biggest suspects would be wlp500 or wlp550, which are the only yeast that I use that would produce that phenol taste (I don't really brew a lot of Belgians or hefs)
My question is does anyone have any advice on how to ID the yeast to know if it's cross contamination from a known brewing yeast or a new cool house strain (seems super unlikely but it'd be pretty neat)?
