Bleach in my beer

After transferring my ESB to my secondary today i got a little bleach in the beer. I think i got maybe 2 or 3 eye drops worth in there. How will this affect my beer?

as a note it was in a 5 gal carboy almost filled.

Darkstashcrashes said:

After transferring my ESB to my secondary today i got a little bleach in the beer. I think i got maybe 2 or 3 eye drops worth in there. How will this affect my beer?

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A couple drops should be okay..but why are you using bleach?

If you are using it to sanitize because it says so in some book, realize that that information is out dated, and although bleach is an effective sanitizer, there are better sanitizers out there, that don't require rinsing, don't efect the taste of the beer, and are nothing to worry about if they do come in contact with the beer.

The two best are starsan and iodophor.

I put a lot of good info and tips of effectively using sanitizers in here. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/sanitizer-question-54932/ including links to podcasts about those two sanitizers.

Thank you Revvy, you ARE the best.

Well i ran out of starsan, and i am going out of town for awhile. I wanted to rack to a secondary before i left. Unfortunately i didn't have time to run to my LHBS.

Thank you again!

I'm not as confident about the problem as Revvy is, but since the phenols that react with chlorine are an early product of fermentation and your beer is done fermenting, he could easily be correct.

It won't kill you or make you sick (unless you're down playing the amount of bleach), but if you get off flavours, you'll know why.

If wounds are apparent, will time heal them?

Darkstashcrashes said:

If wounds are apparent, will time heal them?

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I dont think you can age out bleach...but crazier things have happened...

I don't think you even need to worry, people have had all manner of airlock backwash in their beers and never noticed...a tiny bit of bleach shouldn't be detectable, or even enough to lighten your insides one bit.

The small amount of chlorine should not be harmful or significantly effect the taste of your beer. Most municipal water treatment facilties use chlorine to treat drinking water. Next time you are in Chicago try some of their tap water and you will even taste the chlorine.

Thank you everyone!

Cheers!

Excuse me for necroing this thread but I didn't want to start a new one to get responses of do a search.

I recently introduced a small amount of bleach in my beer in my carboy due to a spray bottle mixup.

I would like to take this one step further and ask how the bleach introduction may affect my repitching on the yeast cake. I am getting ready to bottle and was wanting to pitch on the cake. Any thoughts?

Revvy. I don't know what your feelings are on this, but I still use bleach to clean off Krausen, and soak bottles that have labels on them. Both get a water rinse and starsan rinse before and beer comes in contact with it again though. Not sure if you have any objection to this method or not.