Drain Pour: Invisible Hand (Scottish Heavy)

I really loved the name for this beer which makes it all the more sad that this batch was a dud. Invisible Hand was brewed to harvest fresh yeast for my club's latest barrel beer. I racked the beer to a secondary fermenter, and poured the yeast at the bottom of the fermenter into sanitized mason jars.

On bottling day the beer had an off aroma and tasted sour. My bottles were sanitized and priming sugar boiled up, so I bottled the beer anyway and hoped for the best. I remembered the 1905 Holiday Ale having a similar flavor before it mellowed over time.

Sometimes you just need to cut your losses. 

After a couple weeks in the bottle, I put one in the fridge and gave it a try. The aroma wasn't as sulfury as I remembered from bottling day, but the beer was still sour. It actually had a somewhat clean lactic acid sourness. I think it may have been cross-contaminated somehow with Dawson's Kriek. I have separate siphons and tubing for my clean and for my sour beers. I sanitized the carboy with bleach to be extra safe. Those precautions weren't enough. A lightly hopped beer like this one is more susceptible to souring.

The good news is that the beer tasted clean when I racked it. That means I didn't give the club infected yeast, and we're not brewing 55 gallons of infected beer.

I haven't gotten around to dumping all of the bottles. I may save a few and tell people it's an American Wild Ale.

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