worried - oatmeal stout ferm. funky

[sideshow274]

So I brewed an oatmeal stout with my brewing buddy on May 5th and the beginning fermentation seemed pretty normal. A few days of aggressive krausen (although a bit less aggressive than some of our other brews) and it leveled out nicely becoming dark and dropping all of the noticeable sediment.



2 weeks after our brewday I decided to rack to a secondary because I was in need of a larger fermenter to be opened up.



In the back left corner you can see the secondary stage at about 3 weeks since brewday showing no visible surface action. However, when I arrived home on Monday night after Memorial Day vacation I found something I have never seen before, after 4 weeks from being brewed it seemed the stout became active again.



Has anyone had this ever happen to them? Is it a normal phenomenon or is it something I should be worried about? I have never had an infection before so I am not sure if any look like this that late in the game? It looks to me like yeast build up along the edge surface of the beer but I have never seen it do this before so I am pretty worried about it...

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

 

[agold]

Did it warm up/get knocked or something like that? If it did, CO2 could come out of solution and make something that looks like a krausen.

 

[sideshow274]

No. It has sat in the closet shown in he picture untouched and the only change in temp. according to the thermometer strip was down, to between 66 and 68 from 70... there is actualy more build up today than there was yesterday also.

 

[Yooper]

No. It has sat in the closet shown in he picture untouched and the only change in temp. according to the thermometer strip was down, to between 66 and 68 from 70... there is actualy more build up today than there was yesterday also.

It sounds like the amount of headspace in the secondary may have allowed some wild yeast/bacteria to take hold. I hope not, but in a finished beer with a lot of headspace like that it's suspicious when activity starts like that.

 

[sideshow274]

There really wasn't that much extra headspace? Its a 5 gallon batch in a 5 gal better bottle..

 

[sideshow274]

Would it be a bad idea to wait til this Saturday to bottle this or should I be bottling it a.s.a.p. to prevent anything further as much as possible?

 

[Yooper]

There really wasn't that much extra headspace? Its a 5 gallon batch in a 5 gal better bottle..

Oh, I must be looking at the wrong fermenter- sorry about that! It looks like in the BB on the left that the beer level is only to the "shoulder" of the carboy and that's the beer I was looking at. Sorry about that!

If you have a beer that is filled to the bung, then it is far less likely to get contaminated during aging in a carboy. I just must have missed that in the picture.

 

[GuldTuborg]

What yeast did you use? I've noticed with highly flocculant strains, if they drop early, will occasionally restart after racking. I'm guessing it has to do with the agitation and oxygenation involved in the process.

 

[sideshow274]

Windsor packet, rehydrated...

 

[GuldTuborg]

Windsor packet, rehydrated...

That's a pretty highly flocculating yeast. I'd bet you restarted a bit of fermentation. We won't know, of course, unless you took a gravity reading at racking time, but that's my hunch.

 

[sideshow274]

I did not because I was in a hurry that day, but planned on bottling this weekend if the hydro reading is good..

 

[finsfan]

It doesnt look terrible so it probably isnt an infection. It looks like normal krausen so i would say active fermentation took over a bit. I would think you are fine but take a gravity reading tomorrow and the day you are racking to make sure it is the same. I will be doing a 2 gallon oatmeal stout in the coming months for winter so keep us posted when racking and let us know how it is doing

 

[sideshow274]

That's what my thought/hope was. I will be testing and hopefully bottling this batch this weekend along with our raspberry wheat this weekend. I will be sure to throw up an update after tasting the left over from last bottle.

 

[sideshow274]

Bottled the oatmeal stout yesterday. I believe it was just a re- actve fermentation. The FG wasn't quite where we wanted it to be but it ended up around 1.023, and we had no other option but bottling due to busy schedule coming up. We bottled 52 bottles of raspberry wheat and 49 bottles from the oatmeal stout yesterday (18 of which we added chocolate extract to the bottling bucket). This morning we moved our bourbon choco-stout to secondary on 2.5 oz oak chips, 4 oz cacao nibs, and 8oz Makers Mark. Now we are 10 min into our boil on a 10gal batch of Red Ale we are making for 4th of July.



Busy brew weekend.

 

[Brewrifle]

Be careful of bottle bombs if the yeast is still that active.