Thermometer went boom

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scrambledegg81

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Yes, as the title suggests, I noob'd my brewday and broke my thermometer into the cooling wort. It was the kind with small ball bearings or something in the base, about 1/4 of which got dumped into the beer. So I filtered the batch with a decently tight metal strainer, but the only pieces I found were left in my boil pot.

A buddy who was helping me brew thinks that I should throw the towel in and dump it, but I want to see what happens with this one. Any safety issues I should think of? I also plan on filtering through a coffee strainer before I bottle.
 
I would dump it. Although it would hopefully settle out, shattered glass is one thing I don't want to accidentally drink.
 
there was a similar post on this subject recently.

contact that mfgr and see if there was anything in there that may be harmful, chemicals, etc.

after that, the solids, glass, bearings, etc, are going to be heavier than the beer and settle to the bottom of the brewpot. anything that gets tranfered will settle with the trub in teh primary. if you rack to secondary, again, anything that might happen to get carried over will settle to the bottom.
if you leave a little in the bottom of each before racking, i personally wouldn't worry about it. the choice is up to you though and no results are guaranteed.
 
Get an auto siphon if you do not already have one and cover it with some sanitized SS mesh or some cheese cloth. Also if you cold crash the beer the yeast cake will harden and hopefully trap and glass or metal in there also
 
This happened to my current batch. It's not a huge deal. Mine was a food safe thermo, in fact most thermo's sold around cooking items are. You can tell by the stripe. it's red. Mercury is silver. The very end of the bulb broke on mine, it still works even. so a minute amount of glass and the loose black balls were at the bottom of my boil pot, I whirlpooled and none of it made it into the fermenter.

The strainer over the tip of a racking cane is a great idea.

Don't dump it.
 
I posted pictures of my brewing process earlier and I had someone comment on the thermometer that I am using. I believe it's the same thermometer that you are using.

They suggested getting rid of it because your problem seems to be happening all over the place. It was suggested that you get a stainless steel dial thermometer.
 
This is why I use a probe thermometer with LED screen. Not only is it more accurate then most analog offerings but it takes up less real estate then a larger candy thermometer or floating setup.

I think I only paid $20 for it, too. Battery life blows...but can't complain too much.
 
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