I am truly Stupid!!!

Tonight I prepared to bottle. I had clean bottle and prepared everything. I took a sample and it finished a hair high but tasted great, an English Pale Ale, clean with a nice hop taste. I siphoned carefully into my bottling bucket and added the priming sugar. I then lifted the bottling bucket and slowly, very slowly stirred the beer to make sure the priming sugar was mixed in but made sure I did not agitate it too much. I waited and then tried to put the bottle filler onto the tap. I turned it again as I struggled with it. And then it started leaking a little. I tightened more and then I saw what was wrong.

I put the washer on the outside of the bucket!!! The washer popped out front and it leaked more. What an idiot! I have 5 gallons of primed beer leaking on my floor. I lifted to the sink. In an effort to salvage it I only one place to put it. The fermenting bucket it came from with a nice yeast cake on the bottom. I siphoned it into there but the yeast is fully mixed in with the beer.

I have 5 gallons of primed beer with fully roused yeast. I have no idea wether I should even attempt to bottle it. When it started leaking I grabbed the first thing I found to prevent it from pouring all over the floor, my bucket with sanitizer in it. So for now I'm going to cover it with alluminum foil and clean up. Now I'll get another fermentation although I guess it will be small and then I can bottle in a few days. I'd like to bottle soon because I wanted to brew on Thursday night,

I feel like dumping it but it did taste clean and good.

What kind of sanitizer and how much?

Star San, only 2 gallons.

It's back in the fermenting bucket with a piece of foil to keep stuff out. It's gonna have to settle as far as yeast goes. I'l see how it looks over the next few nights. The mess part was not as bad as I feared it would be.

How funny would it be if it turned out great after I bottle it! I'll probably put more priming sugar in once it settles a bit, just less than 4 ounces.

I'm upset now but at least it will be a funny story in a day or two.

You poured your beer back into a bucket with 2 gallons of Star San? I'm thinking that's a little excessive. Two extra gallons of sanitized water would be excessive. I don't think this one will turn out well.

Wait wait, the beer is in the original primary bucket with the yeast cake or the bucket with the star san? Because if it's in the fermenter with the yeast (with no star san in it), just wait another 5 days, let the yeast eat the priming sugar, and start all over, priming it again. If you put it in with 2 gallons of star san, forget about it man.

DavidSteel said:

Because if it's in the fermenter with the yeast (with no star san in it), just wait another 5 days, let the yeast eat the priming sugar, and start all over, priming it again.

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This is what I said in my deleted post until I noticed the part about racking into the Star San bucket. The small amount of priming sugar is nothing to worry about. Just wait a bit and begin again. Two gallons of Star San...... not good.

I think in my frantic state I did not state what I did properly.

When the bottling bucket was dripping I let it drip into the sanitizer bucket, not into my fermenting bucket with the yeast cake. I had thought of cleaning my fermenting bucket but I had no way of sanitizing after rinsing the fermenter. But I figured it was relatively sanitized and with that much yeast it would eat the sugar before any wild yeasts in my NYC apartment. So I siphoned into the fermenter, not my sanitizer bucket.

Thanks for the replies of assurance. I'll follow the advice of waiting 5 days, that won't be so bad. I can bottle on Saturday and brew my next batch on Sunday night or Monday night.

Right now I'm enjoying some Blue Point Toasted Lager, I feel better.