Infection or big yeast rafts?

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Tl1991

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Hi all,

I know everyone has probably seem 100 of these posts, but I can't seem to find any posts that look quite like what I'm seeing in my fermenter, we are about 30 hours post pitch with bry97. So thoughts: weird yeast rafts or infection?
20190218_175610.jpg
 
Ps ignore the foam at the top left this is some airlock sanitizer suck back
 
I'd wager that's the beginning of your krausen forming. Wouldn't worry it's supposed to happen, good sign the yeast are thriving and fermentation is happening.
 
Thanks all,

I've just made the jump from smaller batches to 20L, part of the jump was ditching my old transparent demijohns for the standard 25l bucket. It's hard to adapt to not being able to see what's going on inside! :laugh8:

I've woken up this morning and through the wall of the bucket I can just about make out what looks much more like the proper krausen I am used to, so I'm much more confident that all is well, I'll leave it alone now.

I think part of what contributed to my worry was the crazy long start-up time of this BRY-97.
Having only used safale US05/S04 (and a couple of MJs yeasts) I'm used to looking away for two minutes and coming back to a massive krausen. I've never witnessed the 'formation' as it were.

Looks like lots of people have this issue with BRY-97, perhaps worth stricking with the US-05 for the peace of mind.

Cheers!
 
Also, for the curious, the beer is an Azacca "SMaSH" with plain old MO.
I put that in quotations because it isn't technically a SMaSH; I used Magnum as a neutral bittering charge to hit my IBUs.

Never used Azacca so hopefully I'll learn something,
 
That looks 100% like yeast to me, and not any sort of infection.
It's not a strain of yeast that I'm familiar with - have you used it before? Different yeasts can vary widely in their behaviour.
Your photo suggests to me that this is a highly flocculant strain trying to be true top-fermenter. If so, most of the yeast might actually be floating on top of the beer, rather than fermenting it! I often use flocculant top-fermenters, and have often found it beneficial to "rouse" the beer in the early stages of fermentation (especially if the pitching rate is on the low side). In essence, this is stirring the beer vigorously so that the yeast is beaten back into the wort. If the fermentation has begun, even if slowly, and you are careful with your hygiene, then my experience is that introducing infection is very unlikely. Once it gets going properly, then you'll have a thick, bubbly krausen & no need to touch it further.
 

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