I have been using star sans in a blow of tube setup. How often should I change the star sans solution that the blow of tubes enter? As well how long is star sans undiluted viable or should I be buying new every time I brew?
...The starsan in the bottle, undiluted, should stay good for at least a couple of years.
It's basically just phosphoric acid and some other stuff, why would it go bad?
My Star San is cloudy as soon as I mix it, does this mean it isn't working as well as it should? If it starts out cloudy, how do I know how long I can keep it? I guess I need to get lids for my HomeDepot buckets and start using distilled water.
Sigh... lot of misinformation about StatSan here. Cloudy can be an indication that it's no longer effective, but it can also mean nothing.
As another poster said, it works entirely by having a pH that microorganisms aren't really able to live in. You want it to be under pH 3.5.
So testing viability is obvious... just check the pH. Many brewers already have meters to do this with, but test strips are cheap, and good enough. My water comes from Lake Ontario, and so it is *very* hard. As a result, it turns very cloudy immediately upon mixing. And yet, I have left this cloudy solution in an *uncovered* bucket for over a month, with the pH never going above 1.5 - that is 100 times more acidic than a pH of 3.5! The fact that it's cloudy doesn't mean microorganisms are somehow going to survive such a low pH any better than they would if the solution was clear. It's acid, and the way it works is extremely straightforward - if the pH remains low enough, it doesn't matter WHAT it looks like.
I mix StarSan w/ my local tap water. It clouds almost immediately but the pH remains ~2.7-2.9. Don't really buy into the whole toss it when it's cloudy thing.
I mix StarSan w/ my local tap water. It clouds almost immediately but the pH remains ~2.7-2.9. Don't really buy into the whole toss it when it's cloudy thing.
SankePankey said:I use my ugliest corny keg and make 5 gallons of star san and pressurize it (which also doesn't alter it) so when I need another cup of star san, I just get out my corbra tap. (Also handy for cleaning out the tap lines).
So I can store five gallons in an empty keg long term? No side effects? Just dump it out if I ever need the keg for beer? If so that will save me from wasting gallons of this stuff on brew days.
If it starts out cloudy and you have mixed it properly, then you need a new source of water. cloudy will not do for sanitizing. Cheers
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