Floaty stuff in the bottom of my cider

[bill_face]

Hello there.

I've been making cider for several years now. I make it from decent cider apples and do a wild fermentation, and its generally pretty tasty.

This years batch has quite a lot of floaty stuff in the bottom of the demijohns. My process this year was to ferment in a 5 gallon tub for around a month until the fermentation was almost complete. Then I racked to demijohns, and waited for a month after bubbling had completed, by which time it was still very cloudy, so I racked to a fresh demijohn to let it clear up a bit before bottling. It has been in this stage for a couple of months now. The photo you see contains two different varieties of apples. The dark one is Yarlington Mill & Browns (with some Foxwelp to bump up the acidity), the lighter one is Harry Masters and Foxwelp.
If anyone has any insight into what it is, and what I should do about it I'd appreciate it

Some of the bottle also have a bit of something growing at the top:

I've also made a video to show the bottom in motion:

 

[RichardM]

The stuff at the bottom (sinky, not floaty, stuff) look like the normal by products of fermentation settling out. The stuff at the top looks like pellicle to me.

 

[Manners]

Sounds like a lovely place to visit does that, lots of oo arrr from the locals though!

Im no expert but it looks similar to mine, which from the taste I assume to be tiny bits of apple solids and maybe a bit of yeast.

The stuff on top looked slightly more concerning tbh?

 

[bill_face]

Hey. Thanks for the replies. Dead yeast is quite powdery. this stuff if a bit bigger, but does look a bit fungal. It does seem to be settling rather than growing though.

About the stuff on the top: how to I know how bad it is? Presumably a taste test. Maybe try feeding some to the gerbil and see if it survives?

 

[lupinehorror]

loud incogerant gerbil singing at 3am can be quite wearing.

 

[raymondo]

The stuff on top is film yeast - have a look here. Hope this helps.
https://groups.google.com/g/cider-workshop

 

[johncrobinson]

Thats "wild fermentation" for you.
Bit like playing Poker.

Instead of having a pure yeast culture,You have hundreds possibly thousands of different micro-organisms in there all taking turns at doing there thing.

The good news is its very,very unlikely that any of them are actually harmful.
realistically the worst that is likely to happen will be off flavours.