Earwigs in my brewing equipment! :-O

I'm sorry to gross everyone out, but I'm not sure what to do! After my last brew I rinsed out all my equipment and stored it in my basement. I went down there to gather all my materials, and found a bunch of earwigs (pill bugs? silverfish? disgusting critters!!) in the tubing for my autopump. What do I do now? Should I boil it? Bleach it? Will just some starsan work? I would hate to throw it out, but I'm so grossed out now I just might...ugh!

A thorough washing, followed by bleach, followed by Star San will kill anything that is living in/on that equipment. If you clean like the dickens, then you should be safe from an infection/microbe/bacteria standpoint. However, you really need to decide if you can personally trust all that cleaning to get rid of the germs. If you do not feel comfortable about re-using equipment that had been in contact with insects, I can respect that, but if it were me, I would clean and sanitize it to death and keep right on brewing. Star San and bleach are much less expensive than replacing all my equipment.

Free Protein!

Can you dry hop the insects?

for your next batch, include a protein rest ..... not sayin, jest SAYIN'!

They don't eat much........

bighorn_brew said:

They don't eat much........

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Better yet...they don't drink much.

A good soak in Oxyclean followed by Starsan will do the trick.

Yeah... I had one in my tubing and one under the false bottom in my mash tun while it was outside drying. Sanitized the hose and didn't worry about the mash tun... no problems yet.

Had a moth land in my porter while it was chilling outside at night and a bee fly in my honey IPA (no joke) while it was boiling. Just a part of homebrewing. No flies yet thank goodness...

That's funny as shi$. I have a bunch of earwigs around my place and I find them in my siphon tubing and blow off tubes all the time during the summer (while not in use that is). I brew in the basement as well and they love it down there for some reason. Not a big deal. Just sanitize as usual and you'll be fine.

Had a couple in my bottling wand last week. Cleaned it, sanitized it, used it. No worries. They are nasty little critters though. Seems like we have a LOT more than normal this year.

I heard an earwigs mouth is cleaner than a human's mouth........ hey, at least they don't lick their own butts!

Thanks for the reassurance, guys. I'm going to clean the ever living **** out of them and move on. We have a lot of those earwigs running around this year, and it's so gross! GAH!!! I'm thinking of maybe stuffing the tubing with aluminum foil or something to detract them. I know that the bugs probably won't hurt my final product, but those things still give me the heebeegeebees!!! They look like little aliens!!!

I used to keep my kegs in my basement on the floor before I built a kegerator. Well what a nasty surprise I found when I poured a stout of mine only to find an earwig made it into my glass! The little bugger was hiding IN the picnic faucet! Needless to say, I plucked him out of the glass and downed that sucker (haha really did). After that, I always kept my picnic faucets submerged in a tall quart container filled with starsan.

Anyways, the moral of the story is that they like moist, hidden, dark places. Chances are your tubing wasn't completely dry before Mr. Earwig found home. If it was me, a good cleaning and good sanitizing should do the trick and just be a little more careful in the future. Consider some insect traps a little bit AWAY from where you have your equipment if you're still having troubles and perhaps some storage bins for it all.

Although basement temps are ideal for most people at least at some point during the year for fermenting, be very careful of making sure your fermenter is SEALED TIGHT. I actually had an incident where I got an infection via the airlock when I found several small dead flies in it. I think I got a suckback which caused one of them to go in infecting the batch (I still have it BTW and I think it's going to make my first ever [but fabulous] sour). Just a heads up.

I get bugs in my equipment all the time. I just clean and sanitize as usual and have yet to have an infected batch. I'd be more worried about fruit flies hanging around at bottling/kegging time.

Better to find one of these in something alcoholic then in a bowl of cereal like I did last week! lol

So are they ear wigs or pill bugs? There's quite a difference between them.

If you meant pill bugs, this is something my mother used to do, and it works really well: cut a raw potato in half, hollow it out with a spoon and put it upside down near your equipment. The pill bugs are attracted to the potato halves (they are moist and dark) and will ignore your equipment! Much cheaper and more effective than insect traps, which might not even work on pill bugs since they are not insects but *gasp* crustaceans

Kind of off topic but once I found a big brownish colored spider in my grain crusher. Just for a sec I thought about turning the rollers (sick I know lol) but then thought better of it and carefully removed it.

I had silverfish get into my propane burner. Didn't know it until the iron heated up but they came flooding out of the air vent like a mini plague.

solstice said:

I had silverfish get into my propane burner. Didn't know it until the iron heated up but they came flooding out of the air vent like a mini plague.

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Ohh god lord!! Thats almost as good as me yesterday, I went out to my little brew shed was getting ready to test my RIMS set up....Opened up the cover on my outside electrical plug and out flops out a spider web with umteenbillion babies flying every where....Now...me being a touch more arachnophobic then the rest of the world almost flipped the eff out and fell off the deck sling my bar towel around like a baseball bat....

Needless to say, I got them all....i hope....god i hate spiders....