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Interesting "bad batch"..... Need suggestions please!

S

switched

Hey everybody. So far I've been able to find the answers to most of my brewing questions by searching through these forums, but this one I feel like I need to throw out there and see if anyone has any input.. Here we go...

Me and my buddy Gary came up with this recipe using smoked grains and were going to throw in some woodchips and let the beast ferment for a good amount of time, just to try and pull off some unique beer.... Primary fermentation was a success as far as I could tell, but we didn't measure gravity or anything so it was kinda just a "did that seem like 3 minutes since the last airlock bubble to you?" thing (at this time we didn't really care, we were new to brewing and wanted to get the ball rolling haha). So we put it in our secondary and locked it up.

Unfortunately, after he got drunk one night while I was away and his curiosity got the best of him, Gary pulled the airlock off, took a swig out of our brew, sealed it back up, and then put it back into the closet....... A month or so later when I checked on the beer there is this white hard stuff floating on top of it and I start to think it got infected and ruined back when he opened it up... At this point, school was starting and I was busy and just left the beer sit out in the hallway in the light and in the 90 degree weather and figured someday I'd just toss it out....

Fast forward to today, almost a year later.  I've decided to brew up a new beer and want to get my equipment all cleaned up.. So I start emptying the beer that's been sitting this whole time, and realize that it smells damn delicious! Hahaha. Now that I can see it close up, it doesn't really look like the white floating debris was mold after all... Maybe dead yeast or something?  So, after all this, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps this beer is still salvageable?  We never did put the wood chips in. Maybe I should toss them in, let it ferment a bit longer, and give bottling a shot? The yeast was most likely killed off after sitting in the hot weather this whole time, so do I need to add some if I do bottle? Should I even bother at all? I have no clue if this is safe to bottle, haha.

So, does anybody have any thoughts? I'd really appreciate it. Thanks alot!


............And no, I'm not Gary. lol.
 
Taste it!  There's no better gauge of success, failure or the gray grounds in between. 

My guess, however, it that it's "pipe cleaner".

cheers
 
+1 for SickBrew
Taste It, But I would hazard a guess also that It won't be drinkable!

On the slight chance that it is, for it to carbonate you will need to add some fresh yeast and bottling sugar. The yeast in there is too old and Im sure dead by now.

I would say pitch it down the drain and start over!

Cheers
Preston
 
Agreed.  If you brew fairly infrequently, you don't want to spend incremental time on something that won't be enjoyable.  Start from scratch and take it through to bottling so you can start enjoying it in 5-6 weeks.
 
Thanks for the input everyone.  Finally went ahead today and tasted it... And all I can say is.. Wow. This brew somehow managed to turn out great! Haha. Of the 6 or so beers I've made sofar, this is by far the the clearest one (could be the long secondary time?). Looks like I'm going to go ahead and bottle in a few days. I hope after about a year it can last through the weekend without going bad, lol.
 
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