Skim the mold or toss?

[KaptainKarl]

I've got a porter in primary, in a PET bucket. Because of a string of family and medical emergencies, I basically had to forget about this batch for nine weeks.

I checked on it today, hoping it might be okay to bottle. Peeking through the airlock I see a pretty good bunch of fuzzy green and white mold covering about 2/3 of the surface. No pics, sorry. A sample taken from the spigot tastes good.

Can I skim the mold and bottle, or is this a case of better safe than sorry?

 

[brrman]

Don't skim it - rack it to another vessel (try not to disturb the mold patch on top) and leave an inch or two with the mold floating in the original vessel. I had to do this once with a porter as well, though I only had a couple small islands of mold floating. Beer was just fine - hopefully your will be too.

 

[JonM]

Are you sure it's mold? I've occasionally had krausen stick around for weeks (not nine, but ...)

If it's for sure mold, I'd toss it and double check the sanitation practices for the next batch.

ETA: if it's infected it could continue working in the bottle and cause bottle bombs.

 

[Bellybuster]

Don't skim it - rack it to another vessel (try not to disturb the mold patch on top) and leave an inch or two with the mold floating in the original vessel. I had to do this once with a porter as well, though I only had a couple small islands of mold floating. Beer was just fine - hopefully your will be too.

^ this, Ive been there where things get forgotten. Twice Ive racked out from under mold, no issues either time.

 

[KaptainKarl]

Yeah, it's green and white, fuzzy, floating in the center. Not like the remains of the krausen. I've decided to go ahead and bottle. I'll put most of it in bombers, so if it goes bad, not so many bottles to dump. I'm also pitching a bit of yeast in the bottling bucket just as a safeguard. I've got a half-packet of Safale 04 that will just get tossed otherwise. Can't hurt much.

 

[unionrdr]

Well, when you see a pellicle on top, it's not just on top of the beer. I learned that the hard way. Skimmed it off my NZ-hopped Maori IPA & even sprayed it with Starsan after removing the nasty dry hop sacks. It lived into the conditioned bottles, but subdued. That extra yeast won't have much time to compete with the wild stuff, but can't hurt I imagine.

 

[KaptainKarl]

Well, it's been a few weeks, and the beer is no worse for the wear.

 

[masskrug]

I had a dirty dry hop sock infect a beer. I went ahead and bottled it. It had soured, but I drank it and lived through it. If you have enough in your pipeline, then you might want to dump it. If you need beer, you can suffer through it.

 

[DoctorDuvel]

I had an infection with a porter once, very similar to what you describe. Everything smelled fine, samples tasted fine, so I bottled it. Carefully transferred to bottling bucket at bottling time, turned out to be a pretty good beer, no signs of infection from the bottle.

 

[passedpawn]

I'd dump it without blinking.

 

[Billy-Klubb]

I'd dump it without blinking.

I'd do the same.