A short piece of vinyl hose spent 6 weeks in my beer -- now it's yellow and smells...

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Geordan

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This is an odd one, but here we go:

About 6 weeks ago I brewed a Schwarzbier, and aerated it using my usual method: a 2" long chunk of 3/8" vinyl hose with a hole poked in it -- my ghetto venturi aerator.

Somewhere during the transfer, disaster struck, and the vinyl hose ended up in the carboy (and a gallon of schwarzbier ended up on the lawn) but I pulled together, finished 'er up and recovered. By the time I noticed the vinyl hose had disappeared into the carboy, I figured "how much harm could it do, anyways?" and wrote off any efforts to retrieve it as too damaging to the beer overall.

Tonight I finally racked it to secondary, and when I recovered the vinyl hose, it was still in one piece, but was discoloured a vibrant yellow, and smells strongly of urine (ammonia?) when you hold it to your nose. The beer itself doesn't seem off in any noticeable way.

So, folks, is this actually a concern, or was my original hypothesis ("Totally not worth worrying about") correct?
 
who knows if the hose leached something into the beer but i eliminated all vinyl hoses from my brewhouse as soon as i learned about silicone hoses.
 
I'm not sure about the smell, but vinyl likes to turn yellow. Your beers probably ok, but you might want to discard that tube and make a new one for future use.
 
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