Sanitized everything but one thing

[Raven_BC]

So i did 3rd ever brew today. I sanitized everything even things I didn't need except for one thing. The measuring cup that I re-hydrated the yeast I just took out of the cupboard without sanitizingand added the pre boiled (and cooled) water to the yeast. At which point I thought about how much of an idiot I am.

Any thoughts on this. I know only time will tell. I'll let it ferment per usual and see what I get but damn this is annoying.

On the plus side I had build my own wort chiller which I tried for the first time. My first batch with a crappy ice bath was 60 minutes to cool, batch 2 with a much better ice bath was 40 minutes. This batch got me to under 70f in 11 minutes for about 3.7G.

On the bad side I didn't have enough clean water to top up enough to hit my OG. I got it at 1.050 when it was supposed to be 1.044. This is after adding the extra 2G of clean water after that the wort app told me too. Oh well. Live and learn it's been a very late brew night for me. I hope it still works out.

 

[seatazzz]

I'm willing to bet you'll be fine. The only thing I'd be concerned about your "unsanitized" measuring cup is any residual detergent from your dishwasher, but that should be negligible.

+1 on improving your chilling. And unless your untreated house water is horribly full of chlorine or chloramines, you would have been fine with using that to top up. In a pinch, you can also use just plain old bottled water (spring or distilled), straight from the bottle, with no worries.

 

[eric19312]

You will remember the to sanitize that cup next time and probably be ok this time. I'm assuming you are not harvesting the yeast, if so you might want to skip harvesting this batch given a lingering slight concern about contamination and low cost of a replacement pack of dry yeast.

I agree with Seatazzz about being able to top up with plain bottled water from the store. I would not use tap water for topping up as even a small amount of chlorine or chloramine in your tap water can impact your beer. If you are more than 12 hours into fermentation though I would ride it out as you don't want to add the dissolved oxygen in the fresh water at that point.

Sounds like you are doing extract so I'd be careful about your assumption that you need more topping up water. Extract batches with top up water are pretty frequently over or under gravity on hydrometer readings due to less than adequate mixing after topping up. If your final volume in fermentor was pretty close to target per kit instructions I'd call it good and assume your OG was probably close to kit design.

 

[mongoose33]

As long as the cup was clean, you'll be fine. What I do is just spray the rim and inside w/ Star-San, then rehydrate as normal.

My son is a microbiologist (sadly, his area is NOT yeast, it's bacteria). He says that you almost always have bacteria getting in your wort, coming in on dust particles. The trick is to have enough healthy yeast to outcompete that bacteria before it gets a foothold.

So, yes, you probably did have some sort of "infection." And yes, it won't matter as long as the yeast takes off.

 

[Raven_BC]

Thanks all for this as it provides some reassurance that my late night brew should hopefully be successful without infection. I also have starsan in a spray bottle which I've used to clean various items on an as needed basis.

Eric it's a good point about the mixing of the wort. I didn't stir it after I added the clean water so that most likely accounts for the difference in the OG. I'm not using a kit but a extract variant of the Centennial Blonde. On a 5.5G batch hitting 1.050 vs 1.044 means I would have had an extra 1lb of DME. So note to self stir before taking a sample!