Leaking wort chiller...

Looking for some wisdom. I was chilling my wort this afternoon and started to pull the wort chiller out after it hit 70 degrees and I noticed it was leaking! I estimate it added about 1/2 gallon of water to the wort. I was brewing with DME, a red ale, and did a full 15 soak with specialty grains at 170 degrees. Should I be worried about contamination? Do I need to pour it out and start over? Any advice anyone has would be great!

It probably depends on the quality of your water? Is your water disgusting or pretty clean? If it were me and my water I would just ferment it and hope for the best. Another thing you could do is bring it back up to a boil but then you would have to cool it down again without using your chiller. I am guessing it is a little late for that though unless you just brewed it this morning.

I had similar problem. Short answer is yes I'd be concerned. No don't dump it out. You made it this far, hope for the best...I'm pretty sure it is going to be fine.

I originally built my chiller wrong, had the inlet connection submerged in the wort (transfer tubing, garden hose connected to transfer tube was outside the kettle). Used it for maybe 6 batches then realized that wasn't right. Reconfigured so both connections were outside kettle...actually were above kettle, then chilled. Worked great till I noticd the leak. Probably had leaked into all previous batches, but had not noticed cause it was submerged.

Those beers were pretty good. My beers now are better but so many things have improved since then it's probably not the main reason.

Thanks guys. I have city water which, because of the cooler temps, is highly chlorinated. So I think as far as clean tap water, it's about as good as I could hope for. I bought the wort chiller already made. I'm going to modify it so that the tubing connections sit outside of the brew pot (it was leaking at the copper/plastic tubing connection) as well as strengthen those connections. I went ahead and put it in the fermenter and its bubbling away, so we'll see. Since I did a fifteen minute soak with the specialty grains at 170 degrees, I'm hoping the beer (and flavor) isn't too diluted. Just the same, I think I'll be brewing another batch today and get both going 😜

Aaron