Burned nylon bag in my kettle, batch ruined?

Well I made a stupid mistake when brewing over the weekend and I think I've ruined my first batch in 4 years of brewing. When I put my immersion chiller in my kettle it trapped a nylon hop bag down on the bottom of the pot and a fairly large portion of the bag melted on the bottom of my kettle. When I tasted the hydrometer sample it had a subtle smoky flavor but I'm more concerned about any toxic chemicals that may be in the beer from the burnt nylon. Does anyone know if this beer will be safe to drink or should I just dump it now?

If it has a noticebale flavor like that it probably isn't salvageable.

What color did the bag turn?

I'm willing to bet that while you may have hit the melting point for the nylon, with all that water around it you probably didn't hit the "burning point" (thermal decomposition, really, in this case).

If that's true, then you didn't give off any bad chemicals, I'm thinking, since the bag just melted and didn't decompose into smaller, nastier things that would stay in solution in your beer. If you do suck any small globs of plastic up while you transfer to a fermenter, they'll probably end up in the sediment at the bottom of the fermentor after fermentation anyway.

Revvy is right though, I think, in that if what you taste is from actual BURNT plastic, (not melted plastic), then the flavor won't age out, since those are non-organics we're talking about. (Well, some things eat nylon, but not in the timeframe we're looking at).

The melted part of the bag was a black crusty char on the bottom of my pot. As I mentioned before, I'm not as concerned about the off flavor as I am about whether or not the beer is safe to drink.

Well since people consider me the king of not dumping beer, the fact that I would with burned/melted nylon infusing it, might give you an indication of my feelings on it.

Ewww, black crusty char = thermal decomp. You've now got crap tons of "Chemicals known to cause cancer in the state of California" in your beer.

If you live in California, dump it. If you live somewhere else, you takes your chances.

I'm moving over to Revvy's side on this one.

Ferment it, bottle it up and then give it out to people who ask for free beer and don't even return the empties.

ChshreCat said:

Ferment it, bottle it up and then give it out to people who ask for free beer and don't even return the empties.

Click to expand...

That's what I'd do :cross: