Possible yeast starter contamination

I made a starter last night with WL Pale 001 (2 vials, 2.5 liters for 12 gallons of ipa with starting gravity of 1.060, intermitant shaking. I think I did this right).

I sterilized everything but forgot to sterilize the foil covering the flask. I'm a little weary of the foil anyway but tried it on a recomendation instead of an air lock. I asked my wife to swirl it once or twice while i was at work. Turns out she stirred it with a chop stick out of the drawer. Good for sushi, bad for beer.

Everything seems fine, but i'm paranoid about using potentially contaminated starter and ruining the beer. I'd rather be out a few bucks for a couple vials of yeast than ruin the whole thing and waste a bunch of time making stank brew. I don't want to pitch dry yeast (don't have any and like to use starters with ipa). Am I being paranoid or should i start over and push brew day back???

I think that you might be just a bit paranoid.

You could always taste it and see if there's any signs of funk. Does it look normal? When are you brewing? You could always wait it out and see if anything develops...

It looks fine. I was going to brew tomorrow morning. But I don't know how long it takes a starter to show signs of contamination. Don't want to find out that i pitched some bad bugs and ruined the beer. but it looks fine?? smells like yeast.

Was the starter already fermenting by the time your wife stuck those chop sticks in there? Usually contamination occurs before the yeast takes hold. If the saccharomyces were bumping, I doubt anything else would try to crash that party...

It was going pretty good. I used anti foam when boiling the wort, but it still had definite activity. It had probably been going for15 hours by then.

I hope SWMBO did not get too much grief for that, to a non brewer they look clean.

Chances are you are fine, even when we boil our wort we still end up with a few tiny bits of bacteria etc in our wort it is just we are pitching such a massive number of yeast cells around 200 Billion for 5 gallons in your case and so a few hundred or may be thousand on the errant chop stick should not affect it much.

Clem

Not too much grief. Decided to start over. Didn't want to take the risk.