High Kreuzen Problems (some help please)

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zarathustra19

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Hi Guys,
As you might notice, I'm more of a lurker than a poster here, but this time I need a little advice and maybe some commiseration. I'm brewing a blueberry wheat, not dissimilar from a regular wheat recipe I've done before. It consists of Light DME and Wheat LME (3lbs per), Kent Goldings and Wyeast American Wheat Ale in a smack pack. After the boil was done, I added one pint of fresh blueberries I had frozen just to get rid of them and three pounds of flash frozen blueberries (my plan is to rack onto another 2.5 - 3lbs in the secondary. I came up with a starting OG of 1.052, which is in line with my beersmith recipe calculations.

My problem is that I did not account for the space which the blueberries takes up (I use a 5 gallon plastic bucket I got from a restaurant I used to work at) and when I hit high kreuzen yesterday while at work, my airlock popped off and the expanded blueberries forced the lid of my fermenter off as well. In all, I estimate the wort was exposed to oxygen for about four hours before I discovered it and was able to substitute an improvised blow off tube. This morning, foam had stopped exiting the tube and I replaced the airlock. I'm now getting bubbles at about one every five seconds. What are the chances that I will have gotten an infection in the wort? I keep my fermenter in our finished basement in a shower stall which is immaculately clean and has not been used in over a year, so I'm somewhat confident that Brett or Lacto has not set up shop down there, but I'm by no means an expert so I'm hoping someone else may have experienced something similar.

*mental note, "buy a larger fermenter for fruit beers."

Cheers,
Zach
 
You'll never know until you taste it, so I would suspend all judgement and speculation until then. Keep in mind that there are plenty of breweries that use open fermentation, in the U.S. the first tow that come to mind are Anchor and Sierra Nevada.
 
Your probably fine. At that stage in fermentation there is a lot of gas coming off so it's going to be hard for any oxygen to get in there. I wouldn't worry.
 
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