Sigh...dropped my White Labs vial in starter

Yep, forgot to sanitize the vial. I was shaking it out, dumping the yeast into my mini wort mix for the starter. Of course I dropped the vial into the starter.

My plan is for this to be a 48 hour starter. Is there any way to know whether the starter is infected before I pitch it? What should I do here? Just pitch and hope?

Ack, this was to be my first perfect brew, and already I screwed something up.

If it is just a starter (1-2L) I would think there is enough yeast to out-compete any competition in there, so I would guess you are okay. If you have 48 hours you will surely know by then.

It will be hard to tell in 48 hours if it got infected, but since you're using a starter you should have a short lag time and that will improve your chance of clean beer.

If it were me I would go ahead and pitch it unless you had blue cheese smeared on the vial or had wiped it with a stinky nasty kitchen rag or something like that. If your starter starts fast it will probably be ok. If you're not satisfied with that you could get more yeast.

The only way I know of to tell if it's infected is taste, but I don't think that would show up in 48 hours.

relax don't worry. geive it time

Hey fidgit, I got your PM, but your box is full so I couldn't reply there. I figured I'd just put what I typed up here, and hopefully you get it.


Hey, my brew turned out just fine, actually. I'm very glad I didn't chuck it, or even decide to wait until I could get new yeast. Worked out fine. I think a lot of sanitation issues have some flexibility with them. Obviously better to err on the side of caution with sanitizing stuff, but I've found brewing is more resilient than I first expected.

I'd be a little worried about the label itself coming off though. Seems to me that is exposing the yeast to the glue. I'd be very surprised if the glue was toxic though, as yeast is essentially a food product, but that might change things. I retrieved my yeast package out of teh starter immediately. It sounds like you left yours in there?

Good luck though.