TRAIN WRECK of biblical proportions! (butyric acid)

[tuner]

What a freaking TRAIN WRECK of biblical proportions! (butyric acid)

I've POSTED this on a few other forums, looking for a solution if I should try and save the wort or put it down the toilet?

Did an All Grain this weekend -45% wheat -45% 2-row malted barley -10% malted rye. Boiled my water let it cool to 75 deg C put the water into the fermenter added in the grain bill (ferment on grain) final temp at 66 deg. One hour later dropped to about 64 deg added boiling water to bring it up to 66 Deg. Added Alpha Amylase. At 90 minutes did an iodine test – all is good. Put tight lid on the fermenter let it slowly cool down to 27 deg. Started US05 in Erlenmeyer flask – great looking starter. Pitched the starter at 27 deg. Next morning checked on the mash – VOMIT smell!!

What I did wrong:
• didn’t super clean the fermenter –with Saniclean – just a soap wash and rinse
• didn’t chill the wort ASAP
• should have boiled the wort after 90 mins for 60 minutes to kill the bugs
• wanted the enzymes to keep working on the grains
• wanted a bolder taste from fermenting on the grains
• should have not tried ferment on grain bill for this size of batch
• should have double Saniclean cleaned all vessels and tools
• not sure where the infection came from
• did a Corona clone the week-end before with no infections

What I’ve done now:
• pulled the wort off the grain
• put the wort back into the brewing kettle boiled it for 60 minutes
• not sure if I should try and salvage the batch or flush it about 80 Liters of juice
• everything still sinks like vomit! –room - brew pots and fermenter outside
• need to Saniclean today! –room - brew pots and fermenter
• will boil wort again and do a nose test for the vomit smell
• SWMBO – not impressed with the train wreck smell
• Should have put more oxygen into the wort

I still have the smell in my nose, very sickening –still after a shower and a few good shots of RUM.

Any ideas –guys?

Cheers
TUner

[thecroweater]

Would have said kick it over but now you a ginned around sparging it and recooking it think add a vigorous yeast like bakers and see how it goes. Cleaning is not as important as pitching as soon as possible.

[johnsparrow]

I have read that if you leave it it can dissapear after a while.

[Pikey]

Are we not hearing "Butyric is good " ? And "the vomit turns to pineapple, don't run it before it does" ?

I may be wrong and I'm not an infection guru, but I thought it was a desirable infection.

[thecroweater]

its not.

[kiwi Bruce]

Au contraire mon frere!...I'm out digging F***ing potatoes to get Butyric acid bacteria. Do a search here on HD on esters and phenols...the butyric acid will esterify in the pot during distillation and the esters of Butric are amazingly fruity and wonderful in rum, whiskey and brandy...so I'm told...I still trying to catch the little buggers.

[tuner]

Hi All,

Will WLP653 Brettanomyces lambicus clean up the butyric acid from the wort?

[Opdog]

Both Croweater and Kiwi have a lot more experience with this than I do, but my last experience with butyric acid was a complete disaster. I tried to wait it out, but there was still an undercurrent of nasty. I distilled it and it wasn't quite as horrible as I thought it might be, but is was definitely not good. I have it sitting on charred oak sticks to see if I can salvage something out of it, but I am not holding my breath at this point. Remind me in a year and we will see what happens.

I'm with you on the SWMBO issue. The smell was something horrific and clung to everything. She was NOT impressed. I think the only solution is to clean everything to get the stink out. Good luck. It took me a solid week to get the smell out of my garage.

[HDNB]

Au contraire mon frere!...I'm out digging F***ing potatoes to get Butyric acid bacteria. Do a search here on HD on esters and phenols...the butyric acid will esterify in the pot during distillation and the esters of Butric are amazingly fruity and wonderful in rum, whiskey and brandy...so I'm told...I still trying to catch the little buggers.

well i beg to differ. it does not distill into anything wonderful...or fruity. the distillate smells like puke. surprisingly it does not taste that bad, until you exhale and open your mouth...then it smells like puke again.

I was hoping it was still in ferment, NZC sez it will reabsorb after about 4 days ( if you can stand it that long ) Opdog, are you saying you tried to wait out the ferment? and it didn't work, or it helped a bit?

mine is 3.5 years on oak, still smells a bit like puke but it's complicated. I actually use it on blends in the PPM quantity.

i'd distill it and put it on wood, it's an interesting thing to have in the arsenal.

[Worm_Drippinz]

I would let it ferment out distill it and see how it turns out.

I have had really weird infections turn out to be some of the best liquor I ever made.

This is just my opinion take it for what it's worth, I just hope it's worth your efforts.

[NZChris]

...the butyric acid will esterify in the pot during distillation

Not in my boiler it doesn't.
It might if you hold back the start of the distillation for long enough and at a suitable temperature, but that is just a guess and I've never tried it. If you have the ability to control your boiler temperature, you could try holding it at around 150F, (another guess), and smelling it until it's gone.
It's probably easier and cheaper to let it happen in the fermenter by being patient and not running it until it's ready.

[tuner]

Hi All,

Well here's what I did today:
- Boiled it again
- Chilled it
- put 1 lb of Bakers Yeast
- 2 Gallons of Black Strap
- put outside on the back deck
- it can sit outside for a week or two
- It may be good or close to the compost bin

Cheers
Tuner

[NZChris]

Impatience isn't a skill. Good luck.

[Worm_Drippinz]

Why so much yeast?

-just curious-

[tuner]

Impatience isn't a skill. Good luck.

The wort was still in the boiler. I had killed everything bugs and yeast so had to restart the batch..

Cheers

[Shine0n]

You may have lost a wonderful spirit sadly!

Luckily I ferment outdoors in the barn so my puke smell was there and not indoors where the wife would've killed me. lol

Although mine was not AG I did intentionally infect the dunder pit with raw dirty potatoes. I thought to myself how the hell could I add this to my low wines and create the pineapple esters but when I did it blew my mind, now the distillate has a feint pineapple taste. (Rum)

I'll have to check but I believe the turning point is around 4-6% for the fatty acids to start turning around to create the esters desired.

I do punch the cap down on my AG mashes every day sometimes 2 times a day, just do it nice and easy to not introduce o2 in the ferment.

although yours was not intended I think some More patience would've served you well and would've turned into something special later. Maybe have let it sit for 2-3 weeks to settle and clear and maybe the change would've happened.

[The Baker]

Dunno about trains in the bible.

There was of course the motorcycle race, when Moses came fourth on his Triumph....

Geoff

[thecroweater]

Don't sweat it ya lost nothing worth keeping, you may or may not salvage it to make a decent dram but the way it was heading it would have been one seriously nasty libation.

[Opdog]

HDNB - I tried to wait out the ferment. I don’t think I waited quite long enough. The smell did become less with more fruity overtones, but the nasty never really went away completely.

[tuner]

As I asked on another Forum for help as well - Here is my update:
The ferment was still going strong and the smell getting bigger and stronger! What I've learnt about distilling is that most of the time, one just concentrates the product - so my thinking is "Garbage in Garbage out". If you make sauces with Cheap Wine you have a Cheap tasting Wine sauce. So into the compost pile it went today. Bleached all plastic parts and PBW all metal parts lets hope that I've killed that bug!

On to the next AG Mash. Lesson learned.
Cheers
Tuner

[Shine0n]

if I raise my ph to 5-5.5 the pellicle returns and smells to high hell, if I let the pH drop, down goes the pellicle and the fruity notes return.

Sorry to hear about the bad luck, maybe the next will be a success you can enjoy!

Shine0n

[tuner]

if I raise my ph to 5-5.5 the pellicle returns and smells to high hell, if I let the pH drop, down goes the pellicle and the fruity notes return.

Sorry to hear about the bad luck, maybe the next will be a success you can enjoy!

Shine0n

Thanks
Tuner

[NZChris]

I wish I'd known to sit on my thumbs and wait thirty years ago when I stupidly kicked my first butyric ferment over. It was probably going to be the best likker I'd made so far, but I hadn't done the research to find out it was actually a good thing. It was four still charges worth of ferment from hand harvested, malted and ground corn. I'm still kicking myself over that one.

[der wo]

I found it always simple to get the butyric acid smell changing to fruity esters. But it's not like if I had done infections my whole life. Perhaps I simply was lucky. I am not sure, if everybody here really writes about butyric acid smell. But if so, what could be the reason that the reaction doesn't happen and what could help?

tuner,
your mashing protocol favors unfermentable sugars. Normally a fresh wort with mainly fermentable sugars would attract wild yeasts, which would start a more or less normal alcohol fermentation. Then after the the yeast has converted all the fermentables, a bacteria could take over the mash. You had the smell from the very beginning, so probably your mashing didn't work optimal. An iodine test is no proof for fermentable sugars. 66°C was bad, adding boiling water was bad, boiling the mash was bad for conversion.

Esterification is a reaction which likes high abv, heat, low pH and if possible a catalyst. If you have butyric acid in the distillate, you only have the high abv, which will help the reaction. Perhaps this is not enough. And this means perhaps it will never go away (unless you redistill it), because a few ppm butytic acid is enough to ruin a spirit.
It's way easier to have the reaction before aging. This helps (I don't think you need everything of the list):
-relative high abv washes
-acidifying or adding a catalyst (sulphuric acid) before stripping
-stripping run: Long heat up phase
-adding acid (backset,dunder) and/or sulphuric acid (catalyst) to the low wines
-spirit run: Long heat up phase and if using a reflux still running 100% reflux a while

[kiwi Bruce]

I wish I'd known to sit on my thumbs and wait thirty years ago when I stupidly kicked my first butyric ferment over.

"Thirty years ago" long before the days of the "Internet" and the "world wide web" the good old library was all there was!

[tuner]

Hi All need more help,

SO today I fired up the Kettle and boiled up some water. Turn on the exhaust fan and went on doing other things. Came back to the brew room about an hour later water is happy boiling - the room is RIPE and STRONG with vomit smell - it seems that the whole exhaust system is full of the Butyric Acid smell.

SWMBO is not impressed!!

SO cleaning with an acid to kill an acid based smell (Butyric Acid) just will not work! Looks like I'll have to find a strong alkaline cleaner to neutralize the Butyric Acid.

Any ideas folks?

Cheers

[thecroweater]

nappisan, metabisulphite or lye if its a plastic fementer it takes a lot of cleaning and airing, I've had one airing for 18 months and there's still a hint of yuk to it. Sure as god made little ants it ain't friggen "fruity" or no darn fruit I'd eat anyways, dead skunk maybe.

[der wo]

SO cleaning with an acid to kill an acid based smell (Butyric Acid) just will not work! Looks like I'll have to find a strong alkaline cleaner to neutralize the Butyric Acid.

Any ideas folks?

I would try denatured alcohol. If you have at home add a tiny amount sulphuric acid (battery acid).

[tuner]

Hi All,

Someone said go to the Pet store and get Nature's Miracle, so I did! SWMBO - is happy with the smell, and it looks we may have clean up the smell!
Cheers
Tuner
http://www.catonam.com.au/p_naturesmiracle.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

[der wo]

Gratulations!
The main ingredients are water and isopropyl alcohol...