Is my beer going to be fooked ?

[Goose]

I tried a 5 litre yeast starter with 2 x one year old packs of Danish Lager which seemed to yield a healthy crop after 5 days.

On brewday and ready to pitch, I cracked open the bottle and noticed a slight phenolic smell in the lid and airspace, but when tasting the liquid above the yeast I could not detect any such flavour. So I took the chance and pitched it anyway.

I am relatively new to starters and am unclear if such smell is normal though I can detect phenols at a thousand paces.

Of course I am now shitting myself that this beer is infected with a wildy. Time will tell, one day into ferment and its going fast at 11 deg C.

Anybody dare to make a call on whether I have wasted a brewday ?

 

[Goose]

Didn't expect a reply but I'll update anyway.

Beer is down below 1.020 already and I can detect no signs of a wild yeast in there.

I thank the beer gods. :huh:

Because yeast starters taste and smell so bad anyway I guess it is hard to determine whether its infected ?

 

[Yob]

Infection will stand out like dogs nuts, mote subtle is yeast stress to begin with until it's 'finished'

I'm extremely paranoid about starters an monitoring the behaviour.. All (stirplate) starters become fairly oxidised and bears little on actual yeast health.. Which TBH I'm personally still getting my taste buds around.. Still..

The behaviour of the starter is more important than the taste of it

 

[Weizguy]

Always a good idea to taste your yeast starter before pitching, and again taste the beer before packaging.

No point bottling or kegging a bad batch

 

[Goose]

Infection will stand out like dogs nuts, mote subtle is yeast stress to begin with until it's 'finished'

I'm extremely paranoid about starters an monitoring the behaviour.. All (stirplate) starters become fairly oxidised and bears little on actual yeast health.. Which TBH I'm personally still getting my taste buds around.. Still..

The behaviour of the starter is more important than the taste of it

Thanks for that Yob.

I used a stirplate indeed and apart from the phenolic smell the spent "wort" was sourish but could not really taste anything "wild". I came very close to binning it and resorting to dry yeast backup. I know things can go wrong when making starters and it took a bit of a leap of faith to risk ruination of 5 hours of good wort preparation.

I think I get where you are coming from on behaviour, I presume you mean how quickly it becomes milky, how much growth you get etc, I cant think of much else to observe really ?

When you say a starter infection sticks out like dogs bollocks I'd like to understand how something that smells and tastes already shite can taste even shiter....

 

[Goose]

Always a good idea to taste your yeast starter before pitching, and again taste the beer before packaging.

No point bottling or kegging a bad batch

Fully. Though cannot detect anything unclean so far in current batch. It'll most likely be kegged. However I have a lot to learn on how to judge the health of a yeast starter still.

 

[heyhey]

Lager yeasts smell funny