Well last Saturday I brewed a Dunkelweizen, partial mash and I think it may have been contaminated. I have an immersion wort chiller which is basically a copper tube that is coiled and you run cold water through it to cool your wort down really quickly. Well mine sprung a leak and shot some water into my cooling wort. Clean tap water has a low chance of contamination but it was going through tubes that probably had some mold or other funk in them due the impossibility of getting all of the water out of the coils. My fermentor was giving of heavy sulfuric odors once it really started bubbling. In about another week when I will normally bottle I am going to give it a good smell and taste and if its fine I will bottle as usual if not...I will dump it. It may not sound like a big deal but thats like flushing $30 and 6 hours of work down the toilet. On the other hand it will give me an excuse to brew a regular weizen instead or maybe pumpkin ale.
Also on Saturday I racked my cider into secondary. Most of the sugar fermented out leaving a final gravity of 1.000 which means it has the same density of water which means there is no apparent sugar left. I also tasted it. It was very tart but still tasted like apples. I plan to bottle it in about 2 months and let it carb up and age another month before I taste the final product.
