racked

I racked the Urschleim yesterday. It seems perfectly fine. There were no visible goobery chunks, no actual slimy bits, no bad smell, no bad flavors. It is possible that some tartness may result, but then again, maybe not. Gravity had dropped to like 7 GU(!), but it was obviously still fermenting, probably because of the inclusion of the honey. It seems a little on the weak side, but I knew that already. Hopefully priming with malt extract when I bottle will help with mouthfeel and depth. I'm toying with the idea of adding some malt during secondary fermentation, but I should probably just count myself lucky on this one and play it straight from here on out.

So the question remains, what the hell happened, if there was no contamination? What was I seeing in there? I see two possibilities:

1. There was no contamination, but killing off the lager yeast caused a big deposit on the bottom, chunks of which were lifted by a weak fermentation to the surface of the wort, giving the appearance of a beer infection
2. There was only a very small amount of contamination, and I caught it in time. The yeast made enough alcohol and consumed enough sugar to kill off the bad bugs.

There is, of course, still the possibility that some horrible flavor will emerge after secondary fermentation or during conditioning in the bottles. Since it seems OK now, though, I'm just going to go with it. It might not be the best beer I'll ever make, but the prognosis seems good for right now.