help! aeration damage-toss it?

OK rookie mistake, but hey I'm a rookie

I made a half a dozen extract batches without problems (8 years ago). Getting back into it. Wife wanted clearer beer so decided to rack to a clean carboy for last couple of days. We bought a new siphon pump to replace mouth induced siphon (seemed ironic to spend hours sanitizing and then wrap my mouth around a hose and stick it in the wort

The short of it is that I was using the tube to follow the wort down to avoid the trub at bottom and it slipped out stopping the siphon. I hated to lose last 1/2 gallon of beer and pumped the siphon to restart. It aerated the hell out of it before I realized it. I knew it was bad right away but popped on the cap and hoped for the best. Sure enough this morning there was about a half inch wide, full circle floating on top of some not real nice looking crap. Looks definitely bad. No off smell (flat beer) but thinking I should toss it and call it lesson learned.

Any input would be appreciated...

Never ever toss a beer. especially from aeration. A couple weeks of conditioning will do wonders. I repeat, DO NOT toss that beer!

Picture maybe. A little aeration transferring is not going to kill you. Don't dump your beer yet. Wait, bottle, and if it taste like sweaty balls in a month or two, then MAYBE you could consider dumping it. RDWHAHB.

You guys are great! Wife is a little quesy, me I figured what the hell

Last question, since I have jerked around with this decsion all day I have a rack of carefully sanitized bottles that have had a sheet (clean over them since midnight last night. Should I re-sanitize or just bottle and put this batch behind me?

if they have been sanitized and covered and that sheet wasn't something you dug out of the back yard, you should be fine.

Save it for a day you plan on getting wasted. Drink a few good brews then switch to the tainted brew. You won't care

Thank you one and all!

You can all go to sleep tonight knowing you saved about 4 1/2 gallons of inocent IPA from a wasteful demise and they will live to die another day.

Heading to the kitche.. urr ... brewery to get this done

The worst that could happen is you start to get a cardboardy flavor in a few months. Since this is an IPA it could take even longer for it to show up. I wouldn't worry about it.

And I know it's already been said but... never EVER dump your beer unless WE say you should!!!

aeration has nothing to do with "a big circle of crap floating on top"

and it doesn't sound like you aerated that badly.

I hope the beer was actually done fermenting in primary before you racked it. at least 7 days in primary...always...and you must make sure its finished fermenting.

let it ride in secondary. taste before bottling. if its oxidized, no sense in bottling. if not, you did ok.

malkore said:

let it ride in secondary. taste before bottling. if its oxidized, no sense in bottling. if not, you did ok.

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This is good advice for someone with a bit more experience tasteing green beer, but if you don't have that experience, it's going to taste nasty one way or the other. Go ahead and bottle....give it a month or so in bottles, THEN if it tastes like (Never tasted sweaty balls) Give it the 'ol toss.

BigKahuna said:

This is good advice for someone with a bit more experience tasteing green beer, but if you don't have that experience, it's going to taste nasty one way or the other. Go ahead and bottle....give it a month or so in bottles, THEN if it tastes like (Never tasted sweaty balls) Give it the 'ol toss.

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+1...Having a N00b try to diagnose an off flavor in green beer is difficult, since green beer usually tastes nasty to begin with...You should always bottle and see it through at least 3 weeks...maybe longer....A lot of stuff fades with time.

There was discussion on Basic Brewing a few weeks back (I think with palmer) where new data suggests that it takes a lot of ppm's of 02 pumped into beer to get oxydation, and that most homebrewing related mishaps, (like the OP's) are not ususally enough to cause oxydation....So we shouldn't stress these things unless we've accidently dropped our oxygen system into our bottling bucket and accidently turned it on and accidently left it on for several minutes.

EvilTOJ said:

Since this is an IPA it could take even longer for it to show up. I wouldn't worry about it.

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Good point. The dominant hop bitterness, flavor and aroma of an IPA can help to mask off flavors.

Not bad advise to just let it sit for a while but it's bottled now so I'll just hope for the best. It feel fairly certain it was done. My reading at transfer was 1.011, bottling 36 hours later was exactly the same and after 30 hours in the bottle I'm not seeing any signs of unual activity. The starting gravity was 1.042 and target was 1.012.

I do admit I was in a hurry to get it out of the carboy. Probably over reacted to the floating circle. Now that I have been surfing on this I've seen a LOT worse that folks say is nothing to worry to much about.

Tasted fine at bottling as compared to the other half dozen I've done. I lightly hop so it usually tastes like drinkable flat beer...

Revvy said:

+1...Having a N00b try to diagnose an off flavor in green beer is difficult, since green beer usually tastes nasty to begin with...You should always bottle and see it through at least 3 weeks...maybe longer....A lot of stuff fades with time.

There was discussion on Basic Brewing a few weeks back (I think with palmer) where new data suggests that it takes a lot of ppm's of 02 pumped into beer to get oxydation, and that most homebrewing related mishaps, (like the OP's) are not ususally enough to cause oxydation....So we shouldn't stress these things unless we've accidently dropped our oxygen system into our bottling bucket and accidently turned it on and accidently left it on for several minutes.

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+1 I have had worse mistakes and never had off flavors (knock on wood). We worry too much because we spend money and time brewing a batch. It is like art to us or a gourmet meal. We want it to be perfect and we worry. Revvy and others always tell us to RDWHAHB. I will do the same. RDWHAHB.

Just an update, tried one after a couple of weeks just to see how it worked out and is one of the best yet. As many here said, much ado about nothing

mesathinks said:

Just an update, tried one after a couple of weeks just to see how it worked out and is one of the best yet. As many here said, much ado about nothing

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Bravo!

I think a lot of the evil things we worry about here (oxidation, autolysis, hot side aeration and what not) are especially prevalent in large scale brewing scenarios, especially BMC, since they don't have hops, alcohol, or flavor to help hide imperfections, they only have cold to numb your taste buds. While it's good practice to avoid these boogeymen, and they can occasionally result in an issue for the home brewer, I think sanitation is going to always be *the* most important thing possible at our level. Everything else just means we consistently make good beer.

If you want to experiment, it's actually pretty easy to introduce post fermentation oxidation when you are bottling. Near the end of the batch let a bunch of air into the spigot, put it into solution with a bottling wand, cap and shake the bottle. Do a couple and mark one...see if you can pick the unmarked one out of the batch (it wont be hard)