Sour mash in styrofoam cooler

[Dirt_McGirt]

I've got a 3lb sour mash with lacto 3 days in and am hoping to brew my first sour tomorrow. I happened to have a small cheap disposable styrofoam cooler on hand, so I just used that.

Unfortunately, just a litte while ago I took a look at it and the cooler appears to have small amounts of thick yellow liquid oozing through the pores of the foam on the sides. Is the Ph of my sour mash eating into the styrofoam and contaminating it with toxic compounds, or am I worrying for nothing?

 

[sweetcell]

i'm not a chemist or a food safety expert, so take this with a pound of salt, but i would be worried about your sour mash decomposing the styrofoam. those coolers should be water-tight, so if anything is oozing through then it means that it has broken down the styrofoam. the decomposed styrofoam (or its broken down components) has to go somewhere, i.e. in the sour mash. i would dump that mash, but i'm pretty nervous about chemicals in my diet. YMMV...

 

[Biscuits]

Yeah, nothing about this situation sounds good.

 

[crane]

Just make sure you pitch some Brett during fermentation. Brett will eat anything including the cancer causing Styrofoam chemicals in your mash.

In all seriousness, I would dump it call it a learning experience.

 

[Dirt_McGirt]

Thanks for the responses.

The sour mash wound up with some funky off-smells - sour milk and bile, definitely some other stuff that contaminated it, probably from too much oxygen and temps that weren't kept high enough. Going to scrap this one and try again. Oh well - sixteen batches without a dumper isn't too bad, I guess....