Hello everyone, I brewed this batch of Canadian Blonde on Aug 26th, 2014. Prior to brewing, I used saniclean and cleaned everything thoroughly! As of couple of weeks ago, everything seemed normal, however, today I noticed a white, sediment/residue of some sort on top of my beer, and I have never seen it before! I'm including 2 links to couple of pictures of the residue for you all to see; it is only a thin layer on top! Link 1: http://tinypic.com/r/juirz9/8 Link 2: http://tinypic.com/r/2zrgqv8/8 I would best describe it as white, cotton like (but very fine) residue, which has some geometric properties in the shape of spheres that join up in a line segment! Tell me if you think it's safe to bottle this beer up from the bottom and drink it or I should cut my losses! One favor to ask, try your best not to speculate too much because if I get too many opposing views, it'll just confuse me further Thank you everyone!! Es.
OK. Not speculating. Here goes: You are safe to drink this. Beer has been around for a good long time. People brewed it before they knew anything about sanitation, microbes, and disease. They developed a process that seemed to yield a beverage free of human pathogens. People would claim beer is safer to drink than water. Brewers and homebrewers have been known to say that no human pathogens survive the brewing process. While I'm not sure I believe it entirely, it has been said often enough that the possibility of getting a pathogenic disease from beer must be highly remote. Your beer is safe. Since you said not to speculate, I will not conjecture as to whether it is tasty. That is for you to decide.
That is most assuredly a pellicle, and one would call it an infection. It is most likely safe to drink, but there is no telling if it will be "nice" to drink. I'd certainly give it a taste before deciding whether or not to pitch it. EDIT: If you do decide to bottle, pay special attention to your FG...if it is higher than 1.000 consider that whatever the beer is infected with could potentially bring the beer down further.
In addition to the good advice given above, I've had a couple of infected beers that turned out PDG. Never surrender . . . bottle it and decide it you have "good" bacteria or "bad" bacteria. Remember, the first beer ever was a result of wild yeast . . . must have been good because they went back for more . . .
always safe. always good? eh. shrugged shoulders. nobody around here is going to tell you what is good. that is for you to decide. just know that you really really have to royally screw things up to get to a point that beer is unsafe to drink. most likely it only gets better from here...
Safe, yes. Is it as you intended, I'm probably willing to bet, that it's not. That is a pellicle, as you have an infection on that beer. What it is, is hard to tell. I'd give it a taste, and see what you think. Not sure what a Canadian Blonde is, but if it's just a blonde ale, then it's probably a good base for a wild/sour ale. If you are into those, and it's not overly offensive, I'd let it go, and re brew your blonde as intended. I would go through all your soft post brewing equipment and clean it all well, as to avoid contaminating the future batches again.
You have a beer that has something introduced to it that wasn't cleaned properly. God only knows what that something could be, but it's certainly been contaminated. That's not necessarily bad and it won't harm you at all. It could be a wonderful accident where the beer takes to whatever got introduced and it develops into a wonderful sour, or it could respond bad and taste like shit. Bottle enough to do some vertical tests, label it and ignore it in the cellar until later and taste it for funsies. If you want to brew regular and non sour beer in the future, I'd go one further on the equipment you used with this batch and replace it and then set that stuff aside just for sours.
The pics show some dried krausen right up to the stopper. My guess is the krausen shot through the airlock and the resulting cleaning introduced some wild microbes. It happens and my advice is to let it roll. In the words of Bob Ross "We don't have mistakes only happy accidents" .........or something to that effect. Safe to drink? I would, but I love sours!
