infection help.

[brewranger]

After a great week in homebrewing...did my first yeast washing, wired up a new ranco, and kegged for the first time...i tasted the newly kegged belgian blonde and it definitely has an off flavor..it is a little acidic which makes me think infection.

my question is, if there is an infection wouldn't i notice an off flavor in the yeast i pulled off the bottom? also, my fg was 1.013 and there was no activity when i cold crashed. would an infection take the gravity lower...or is that such a slow process it would take a while? i used wyeast 1762 abbey II...is this a possible yeast character?

would it be best to let it age a few months and check it out or possibly pitch some brett/lacto to push it completely sour?...or just dump it and wash the keg with my tears.

anyway, im pretty down on the whole thing and need to brew again to make me forget this batch.

[Travisty]

Did you just keg it? If so, give it some time. It might just be a yeast bite. If after a month or two the flavor is still there, then you can decide what to do. If the flavor gets more and more pronounced, then it's probably an infection, but if not, it may just be a yeast characteristic.

[dags]

I'm with Travisty, give it some time, sometimes it can be amazing what a couple of weeks in the keg with the right carbonation can do for a beer. Also if its sour it could be on its way to being soemthing interesting, being colder will make any changes happen slower than they would be warm thought. Not sure that you'd pick up a faint infection in a yeast sample as these bugs can grow at different rates to yeast.

Without tasking this is all guesses though. I probably wouldnt want to reuse the yeast from that batch though, and if your using plastic fermenters toss and you think theres an infection toss the bastards out. I lost a batch of APA to a fermenter that I had previously used for a saison with a hint of Brett. Little bit of brett in a farmhouse I'm ok with, shit load of burnt rubber brett flavour in an APA really sucks arse.

Be a bit zen, give it some time.

[brewranger]

thanks for the advice. i think you may be right about timing. this is the first beer i kegged and as such is the quickets i have drank a finished beer. Also, I did have a huge starter for this 1.060 beer, so yeast bite may be the culprit. Thanks for the feedback.

[TheDarkSide]

How many volumes of co2 did you carbonate to? If it's carbonated too high, you could be getting an acidic taste from that.