I made a big mistake.

I am brewing my second batch and I think I made a big mistake. I went through the whole process fine, but when I was pouring my yeast into the fermenter, the bag fell out of my hand and into the fermenter (I was using dry yeast). I grabbed it out real quick, but do you think my beer is contaminated? My beer is hevally hopped (about 60 BIUs), do you think that might help?

Don't worry about it. It is very slim odds that anything bad happened to your beer. You have to work a lot harder than a yeast packet to ruin your beer.

yeah you should be fine

Don't worry. I've dropped worse than that into my fermentor and come out fine. My dog once dropped his bone in a fermentor while I wasn't looking. That beer came out fine...

OH NO! LOVE IS OVER, THAT BATCH IS DOOMED!

Naw man, it'll be completely fine. The only thing that'll make that batch infected is if you previously did something else that would make it lead to an infection. It'll be fine. It's pretty hard to get an infection.

Your beer will be fine. Unless of course you just held a burger in your hands, then you need to re-name your beer a "Burger Fingers Ale". It's a catchy name, IMO, I like it !

I'm sure that everything will be just fine. A few questions which might help allay your fears even more:

1. Did you sanitize the yeast pack? If so, low likelihood of any nasties.

2. Did you proof the yeast? generally, it explain how to do this on the package. If so, you'll have more active yeast and any beasts that go in your wort with the package should be overwhelmed by the yeast before they can take hold.

Overall, shouldn't be a problem. I've dropped stuff in the wort plenty of times with no noticeable effects. Beer is a very forgiving thing.

Good luck.

Thanks for the response. I figured it was easy to contaminate your beer, but I guess not.

Suthrncomfrt1884 said:

Don't worry. I've dropped worse than that into my fermentor and come out fine. My dog once dropped his bone in a fermentor while I wasn't looking. That beer came out fine...

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So did you adopt the name "Bad Dog Brewery?"

You're going to have to move. What will the neighbors think?

Seriously, you're good. Check out the bottom of this thread where it says "Similar Threads". These are your brewing brethren (and sistren?) who have all been there before.

DamianPollard said:

Thanks for the response. I figured it was easy to contaminate your beer, but I guess not.

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Nah, it's fairly hard. Even if you do start off with some bacteria, we add so much yeast to the wort that it's made enough alcohol to kill off the 99.97% of bacteria Lysol advertises before they can really affect the flavor.

Remember that beer has been made for thousands of years by people with no clue what they were doing (on a microscopic level.) The Reinheitsgebot had to be updated to allow the inclusion of yeast once they found out about the little buggers.

The vast majority of the anal retentive attention to cleanliness and sanitation that we have has a lot more to do with making highly reproducible beers than with making beer.