Chance of infection

Yesterday was my first brew day. Everything went well but when I got up this morning I noticed less water in the airlock. My guess is some how the water got sucked in to the primary. I used tap water rookie mistake. What is my chance of getting out of this ok?

What type of airlock did you use? I doubt that a teaspoon or two of day old tap water would do much harm. Assuming that your yeast are all pretty healthy I wouldn't worry about it. Besides, there's nothing you can do about it now anyway. For future reference, I use vodka in my airlock. It's sterile, and it's an added treat on bottling day.

Probably won't hurt a thing. I usually use tap water and have had no infections. I have used cheap vodka, but I decided I would rather have water in my beer than vodka. Some people use starsan and other disinfectants but my city says my water is safe to drink so I assume it is safe to use in an airlock.

Relax, have a homebrew!

You're fine. Nothing to worry about.

I've been brewing for a year and a half and have used tap water in all 40+ batches without a problem

Your beer was thirsty. I've done much worse, such as trying to turn on the faucet to fill up a sink to cool my wort, only to realize the faucet was over the top of my brew kettle. That batch turned out just fine.

Another time I used regular tap water while resting on the lid of the bucket while pouring it. As soon as I moved my arm it caused suction and fwomp-fwomp-fwomp there goes all of the water, into the bucket. It turned out fine too.

That good to hear. You hear so much about sanitizing that you think everything will cause an issue.

afio18 said:

That good to hear. You hear so much about sanitizing that you think everything will cause an issue.

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I agree. If you visit the forum often, you will start wondering how it's even possible to make a decent beer with all the potential "problems". My 2 cents: use good sanitation but not to the point where it's no longer fun! Think about how beer was made 100+ years ago.....

I've done that before too, with vodka, starsan, and tapwater. It's caused by the beer cooling down and causing a suction.

The first time I used my fermentation refrigerator I hooked up a blowoff tube and put that in a gallon jug quarter full of starsan. I put the carboy in at 68 or so and set the temp controller for 60. By the time everything settled at 60 the next morning the blowoff tube had sucked the entire tube lenght or more of starsan into the carboy... Opps! Beer turned out fine.