I'm sure its been asked a million times but didn't see it on search... Is it Ok to use vodka in my airlock for my brew? It was mentioned to do so when making Apfelwein but a little bit of possible suckback in my brew wouldn't hurt the taste right?
I use water in airlocks. Airlocks for beer is typically a week or two. For cider and wine, airlocks are for a month or more. Suckback or evaporation is not usually an issue in a couple weeks, but some use vodka in their arilocks for beer instead of water anyway.
I started out using vodka (or rather.. 95% alcohol) after I had a suck-back into a plastic fermentor.. Nowadays I'm more careful with those darn plastic lids ;-) But I've actually gone back to water/sanitizing liquid.. Seems that most of the alcohol would evaporate anyway.. and also.. when the alc. content decreases it actually becomes food for bugs. I'm thinking that I'd rather have pure water in the airlock.. that way there's no nutrients for bugs in there once the ABV falls. I work in a microbiology lab and I've seen some pretty gunked up bottles of (supposedly) 20 % alcohol.
I use vodka exclusively. I also top it up every now and then.
Using properly diluted Star-San is also a very safe and viable option, I may start doing that when my bottle of vodka dies... I hadn't switched to Star-San before filling my first airlock.
Vodka in airlock?
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