5 gallons of beer leaked from Keg overnight!!!

[devonnboyd]

So my boss gave me his old keezer and I finally got a chance to start filling it up. I dropped in a corney keg of my mirrorpond clone pale and a corney of the graf I just made and went to bed. In the morning I tested the taps to make sure they held pressure and my pale ale just spit co2 at me. I opened up the lid to find that the entire contents had spilled into the freezer!!!! I turns out that the beverage side connector had a leak I didn't detect when I hooked it up. So now i have a chest freezer full of beer I never even had a chance to try. So I'm trying to decide if I can do anything with the beer besides pour it on my lawn. Two thoughts occurred to me and only one would be legal So I figure that since the beer is already around 6%abv and that I had JUST cleaned the crap out of the freezer, that the biggest problem with the beer would be oxygenation. So i siphoned it back into the keg, added priming sugar, purged any air with co2 and set it back into fermentation temp. The experiment is "can the yeast scrub to o2" I fully expect this to be a waste of time and to end up with nasty stale swill but there's nothing to lose so what the hey. The other option is to just "steam" the beer and "change the nature of its existence" if you catch my meaning. Thoughts?

 

[Quaker]

Take a sample just to see if there are any bitterness or other tweaks you want to make on the recipe. Then dump and re-brew. I see no good coming from attempting to salvage it.

 

[afro_lou]

Sorry for your loss.

 

[max384]

If it were me, I would've dumped it. But, since you've already done the work of salvaging it, wait it out and see. Please include pictures of the pellicle that forms too.

 

[user 163849]

Your best bet would be get rid of all those kegs, lines, taps, co2, etc.
Get yourself some bottles and eliminate all those problems and then if you manage to loose a full container your losses will be reduced to a fraction of what you just experienced. Just bottle it!......

Sorry, I hate to hear about lost beer, but I couldn't resist after all the "just switch to kegs" posts I see in reply to bottling problems...

 

[ThomasPaine]

You could ice it. Something I've wanted to do but didn't have a beer that I wanted to try it on.

 

[UnBrewsual]

Time to find a very large straw and sit real close to that keg...

 

[FrozenOcean]

I think it's worth a try to salvage it. Interested to see if it works!

 

[joshesmusica]

This sounds like a second disaster waiting to happen...

 

[zam216]

So I have had this situation happen to me twice now. Odd thing is it happened the first time then 3 beers on that same keg later it happened again. Me being frustrated that I lost 2 expensive beers I had to find the solution. When I examined where the beer came from it was my post. The O ring had a slight indent in it and it allowed beer to slowly creep out. So I keg lubed the o ring for the rest of what remained of the last leak and it stayed. After I changed all of the O rings out and it is fine now! So don't throw away the keg or the lines just check all of your o rings or replace them just for safe measure.

As for salvaging the beer I wouldn't waste the effort. Just give it the honorable death of pouring down the drain while listening to the sad sarah mclaghlin animal cruelty music.