Did I ruin my beer?

For my first batch of beer I left it fermenting with a hose coming out of it sitting in a bowl where it spewed foam out about 18 hours after. I now realized that I'm not supposed to expose it to bacteria laden air. My first question is if it is already ruined. My second question is if it's not already ruined, can I just put the bowl lower than the fermenter and fill it with bleach water? Thanks in advance!

Cue five people saying: "Your beer is ruined, send the bottles to me for disposal."

It is perfectly fine. Actually, I just did the exact same thing the other day, (Edit: and that was my third batch, so don't beat yourself up!) right down to the hose being exposed for ~18 hours (I pitched at about 3AM, and the whole next morning into the afternoon I was freaking out about a totally different problem and didn't even think about proper blowoff hose setup). Yes, in theory you incurred a very slight risk of contamination, but in practice this is one of the least likely things to cause you problems. As soon as fermentation took off, there was so much CO2 coming out of that hose, it's basically impossible for any bacteria to have gotten through it.

I just filled the bowl with regular water, though other people like to use sanitizer. Your plan of using a bowl with bleach water sounds just fine. RDWHAHB

If I understand you correctly, you did not ruin your beer. If your blowoff hose was in a bowl of water you are fine. If it was just out in the open air, you are still fine because fermentation will create positive co2 pressure that will keep anything from entering your fermenter.

You can put the blowoff into a bowl of bleach water, just make sure there is no way the bleached water can get into your fermenter. Plain water will work fine, or even better would be properly mixed starsan.

If the hose was lower than the fermenter it is unlikely to have any significant risk of infection even if the end of the tube wasn't submerged in a liquid. If the tube was in a bowl sitting above the level of the airlock it is possible that expelled trub/blowoff could have been contaminated then flowed back down back into the fermenter but that would require the tube end to be up on a table or something above your fermenter which is pretty hard to imagine. I wouldn't use bleach water. Regular tap water would be fine. Folks like to use starsans as well.

Sounds like you are fine due to the positive flow of co2 out of the hose as others have said. I would hesitate to use bleach water. If the beer in your fermentor suddenly cooled down by a few degrees this would create a vacuum and could draw bleach up the blowoff line and into your beer. Either use some water, or a starsan mix. I have a couple plain Jane clear 1/2 gallon growlers I use for this purpose.

Let me clarify that I didn't have it in a bowl of water. I have had it open to air for 3 days.

jsweet said:

Your beer is ruined, send the bottles to me for disposal.

Click to expand...

^^^this.

jsweet said:

Cue five people saying: "Your beer is ruined, send the bottles to me for disposal."

It is perfectly fine. Actually, I just did the exact same thing the other day, right down to the hose being exposed for ~18 hours (I pitched at about 3AM, and the whole next morning into the afternoon I was freaking out about a totally different problem and didn't even think about proper blowoff hose setup). Yes, in theory you incurred a very slight risk of contamination, but in practice this is one of the least likely things to cause you problems. As soon as fermentation took off, there was so much CO2 coming out of that hose, it's basically impossible for any bacteria to have gotten through it.

I just filled the bowl with regular water, though other people like to use sanitizer. Your plan of using a bowl with bleach water sounds just fine. RDWHAHB

Click to expand...

Actually you dont need CO2 pressure to keep bacteria and wild yeast out. Pastures original experiments proved 1. contamination wasn't spontaneous (sounds obvious now but at the time it wasn't), and 2. it wasn't simply being in contact with air that lead to contamination. He put boiled growth medium (wort) in a vessel with an opening at the end of a swan neck tube open to the air and no growth occured. The spores (floating on paticles of dust) required gravity to get into the medium. A primary fermenter with a blow off tube is pretty much the exact same thing as his experiment. Putting the end of the tube in a fluid allows you to see the bubbling and makes you feel better but even without it there is really no way for contaminents to float into your beer.

The definitive answer is, your beer is fine. Proceed.

packerzphan said:

Let me clarify that I didn't have it in a bowl of water. I have had it open to air for 3 days.

Click to expand...

Oops, I misread and thought you said it was open to air for 18 hours. Not that it matters. If you left it open for a week, the advice would be RDWHAHB. If you left it open for a month, the advice would be taste it, and unless it tastes like... I believe the preferred phrase around these parts is "Satan's anus"?... then just RDWHAHB.

It actually turns out to be really hard to get an infection. The reason for the obsession with sanitation isn't that one little contaminant is going to ruin the beer; it's because a) if you do get a serious infection, that's one of a very small number of things that can ruin a whole batch (and even then, some people have found that they can just skim some gunk off the top and save most of the beer), and b) it's one of the few things about fermentation that is 100% under the brewer's control and easy enough for the most beginning-est beginner to do thoroughly and correctly.

In other words, sanitizing is cheap and easy, so it's worth doing it even if the risk is low... but if you screw it up, take comfort in knowing the risk is really quite low.

brewit2it said:

The spores (floating on paticles of dust) required gravity to get into the medium. A primary fermenter with a blow off tube is pretty much the exact same thing as his experiment.

Click to expand...

Interesting! Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I suppose I could obstinately ask, "Well what if a stiff breeze?," etc., but yeah, not at all likely. Good to know!

Woohoo! Thanks everyone!

Don't believe any of them. You beer is BAD!!!!!

Bottle it ASAP and send them to me for the proper disposal.. :cross:




E

My first instinct when I read the title, was "no, your beer isn't ruined". Then, I read what you did, and I agree with everyone here. But, just to be safe, you should probably send a few bottles my way to taste test. :rockin: