Dead bug in fermenter

Well, I am making some cider and its about four days into primary fermentation. I went to check on it when lo and behold I found a dead little bug in it. My airlock was still full so the bug had to have gotten in either while the juice was cooling or it hitched a ride in the spices I added to primary. I'm totally bummed! Is it really necessary to ditch the batch?

Did you raise to pasteurization temps with the spices in? If it came it that way I wouldn't worry about it to much. If it got in after pasteurization or you didn't pasteurize it could get interesting. What ever you do don't ditch it yet.

When its finished primary fermentation you can rack to another container and leave the bug behind to finish/settle bug free

:-S

No answers for you other then agreeing with DroolingNeoBrewery. I just wanted to say "Good luck" and "I'm sorry you have to go through such a difficult time". No one likes waiting and no one like ditching booze either. I hope it doesn't come to that!

Good luck

I forgot to write back about this issue way back when I decided that I would try to just leave the bug in there and let it drop out during the primary. It ended up tasting fantastic! The cider was wonderful! Everybody loved it as a matter of fact it was probably the biggest head that I had as a Brewer. So I wanted to thank you guys for your input as I probably would have ditched the entire batch it's not forgetting your advice first

Good to hear! Of course you know that from now on, you'll have to add a dead bug or it will never be the same cider

If it finishes out to be a kick-ass batch, then you are obligated to give it a cool name like "Toasted-Roach Cider" or something like that...:cross::cross:

Are you sticking to the same bug schedule or are you going increase it next time?

i wonder if you drank too much of it it would drive u buggy? i woulda drank it and told everyone it was better than the worm in the bottle

Awesome figured you'd be ok. I agree you need to give it a cool name. When a bung got into my blackberry porter I called it stopper plopper purple porter. And yes the beersmith recipe includes #6.5 rubber bung 20 days primary

Working in a winery I have seen an awful lot of bugs in the wine. Red wine is fermented in open fermenters so heaps of bees get in and drown in the wine. Mechanical harvesters shake every bug off the trellis into the bins, I have seen bins with hundreds of caterpillars crawling around,and lots of spiders. (grapes don't get cleaned, it all goes in the crusher). One bug seems very tame by comparison.

gregbathurst said:

Working in a winery I have seen an awful lot of bugs in the wine. Red wine is fermented in open fermenters so heaps of bees get in and drown in the wine. Mechanical harvesters shake every bug off the trellis into the bins, I have seen bins with hundreds of caterpillars crawling around,and lots of spiders. (grapes don't get cleaned, it all goes in the crusher). One bug seems very tame by comparison.

Click to expand...

You are correct. I have a friend with a winery and if you stand in one place too long during crush...the yellow jackets will find you. (or bees, or hornets or horse flies...and then there's the mosquitos and gnats and the average house flies) There's nothing you can do about bugs when pressing or fermenting large batches. But when you scale it down to 5 gallons as opposed to 1000s of gallons...one single fruit fly can ruin your day. Little Buggers!

An infection from the fly was a very unlikely possibility. When you pitch yeast you are literally pitching hundreds of billions of live yeast cells. The chances of a few thousand bacteria on a fruit fly being able to out compete the yeast is slim. In fact if you did get an infection I would not have been 100 percent convinced it was the fly