Wort Chiller Water in my Beer

I was getting ready to cool a big old kettle of porter yesterday but one of the connections on my wort chiller was loose, and when I turned on the water a couple of seconds of the nasty stuff went right into my beer. I brought it back up to a slow boil for five minutes to try and kill and bad guys. Will that do it? Or am I screwed?

Leaking the cooling water into the wort at the end of the chill is the bad way to do it. You should be fine.

You should be fine since you brought it back up to a boil. Since the water leaked into hot wort, I assume much didn't get in the water. The hot wort should have been hot enough to have killed anything in that accidentally got in the pot.

This happened to me once and the beer turned out just fine.

Absolutely nothing to worry about. Even if you didn't bring it back to a boil you would have been fine. Most beginner kits just tell you to add tap water if you need to top up after the boil. Pre-fermentation there is not a big concern with adding plain tap water.

msa8967 said:

This happened to me once and the beer turned out just fine.

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Same here. I wouldn't worry about it.

I had that same thing happen to me last night, good to hear some positive reassurance. I did an Imperial IPA that was supposed to come out at 1.100 OG but it came out at1.075...If I gave you the recipe you think you could help me?

Thanks for the feedback - sounds like it's no big deal. Checked on it and it's bubbling away happy, so hopefully I have nothing to worry about.

I had the same problem happen (loose connection on the chiller), however my wort had already cooled to about 100 deg. before I noticed -- beer turned out great contrary to me thinking i'd ruined it with dirty garden hose water. Nothing to worry about.

No worries, its happened to me a couple of times.

If your still really worried - take a 2L bottle of diet somethings (i.e. diet Mt. Dew or Diet Coke). Rinse it out only --- ONLY --- twice. fill it up with water from your tap.

Store it. for 1 month. 2 months. 6 months. 1 year. Ya nothing will grow. Chlorine is a nasty nasty gas that tends to kill anything in the water. The only time you have to worry about any infection from water from your tap is if it touches an unclean utensil/nozzle etc. And even then if the yeast is pitched properly it's like lawn grass choking out the weeds.

Being that your chiller was at 212F due to heat transfer - ya everything touching it was nuked with high heat.

I have water from tap in 2L bottles months old.