Hey, I need some advice here. A group of us filled up a used whiskey barrel and just bottled it up a few days ago. There was some white layer on top of the beer, and now I see it in my bottles already too. I think it is Acetobacter. Now I think it got in there and grew like crazy because we did not have the barrel completely full. (First time using a barrel) So, now we won’t to make another batch and fill it all the way up and keep it topped up and all that. I know that you can’t kill bugs completely from a barrel, so should we not use this barrel again? What is the best way to kill some of the bugs in there?
Does your beer taste like vinegar?
The most effective way to get rid of acetobacter is probably steam. This won’t get rid of it but it will keep it in check. Perhaps you can get your local brewery to put it on their keg washer for a while. I did this with a small barrel and it worked pretty well.
This makes a great case for the concept of using oak chips, cubes, or strips rather than a barrel. Same concept as barrel aging but with a less risky and more controllable result.
If you are bent on trying the barrel again, maybe you need to use some sulpher, and then steam the hell out of it as suggested by the others.
Sulfur it only if you are planning on long term storage. The sulfur is nasty, and you don’t want to put beer on it… In your use case fill your barrel to the top with hot water and mix in 50/50 v/v citric acid and potassium metabisulfite. You can pick those up at the local home brew shop.
Thanks for the replies. I haven’t tasted it yet from a bottle. We drank lots of samples on bottling day, and it tasted great. I noticed today that the white film is also in my bottles. I didn’t think that Acetobacter could grow in a bottle? Maybe it is something different…
A white film sounds different than acetobacter. I think the vinegar mother is more of a jelly fish kind of thing. It would start out as a haze throughout the beer. a film ( or pelicle) I think is a sign of brett or pediococus (Spelling?)
Barrel aging does a lot more than giving the beer a little oak flavor. The barrel breathes and this concentrates flavors and gives some micro-oxidation. You do have to keep it topped up if you don’t want to encourage Brett and/or Pediococcus/Lactobacillus.
Its basically impossible to sterilize the barrel now that its been contaminated. If the film is from Brett, you could always make a Flanders red or lambic style beer in it. Those thrive in a barrel.
Well I just popped the top of one, with caution, and it has a tiny fizz to it. It has only been in the bottle a week. It smells great! But the bottles all have the same white film in them and this comes out into the glass. I am a little affraid to try it. Is that normal for a beer from a barrel to have the same film that was in the barrel in the bottle? Can I drink this stuff?
You have to post it on a public site, like photobucket or the like, and then follow the instructions for putting the link to it in the “insert image” thing. It’s not simple at first, but you can get used to it.