Since this will keep me up anyway, why not post about it...brewed a dunkelweizen. 5 gal batch, perfect brew. Wort was very tasty, with a slight, grainy bitterness, but very nice. One week primary fermentation (loads of yeast activity), two week secondary. Primed with wildflower honey for bottling. Tasted great with a little acidity (less after the honey, 150 ml in 5 gal). Tasted a bottle after one week. Uh oh. Flavor isn't too bad, but there's a "mossy" note to the aroma. From the perspective of those wiser and more experienced than me, is this looking like a lost batch or will the funkiness age out? It's not "supposed" to be ready for another couple of weeks. By the way, very little carbonation at this time, but only one week in the bottle. The honey (see above) was added to 200 ml of boiling water before adding to batch.
Mossy sounds like moldy. You might have mold in your beer. If it was an expensive professionally made Belgian you could use the "basement" descriptor and still rate it a 4.6. Unfortunately, it's American home brew and you have several gallons of moldy beer to drink.
Only thing you can do is ride it out, and see what happens. From what you wrote, I don't see any big mistakes made. Maybe it'll mellow out?
The best I could come up with was the term mossy used in a BA description of Kiwi Lambic. I can only hope it was one bad bottle. I bottle brushed the bottles with bleach, ran them through the sanitizer cycle of the dishwasher, and sanitized immediately before filling. The caps were sanitized. I guess I'll have to see where it goes. I guess I'll have to see if it's all of them, eventually.
Two more data points: 1) I had a Dogfish Head 90 min IPA and noticed the same odor. 2) my brew buddy doesn't notice any objectionable odor, hence, I'm nuts. Haven't cracked another bottle yet. Could this be an odor/aroma from the wheat in the Dunkel recipe?
Just tried another bottle, now 2 weeks in the bottle. It's very good now. !?! Absolutely no "mossy" aroma. Either it aged in the right direction or the first one was a contaminated bottle. Regardless, tyvm to the folks that lent their comments and advice. Prost!
Glad to hear it turned out well for you. I was going to say, microorganisms can not live in honey. But they can be in honey in an inactive state. Especially if it is unfiltered wildflower honey (for the record, I'm not knocking unfiltered wild flower honey, that's what I use). It is for that reason, you aren't supposed to give honey to infants. It is conceivable to infect your beer with honey, but it sounds like that is not the case here.
