Airlock reversed?

[Angie25]

I moved my pumpkin spice beer to secondary yesterday and at first everything was fine, bubbles came out of the airlock in a slow regular fashion. Today I woke up and the airlock appears reversed, rather then the water being pushed out its more towards the inside.

In addition to this the taste of the beer is not good at all, horrible acidic almost vinegar after taste.

I am new to brewing and at the risk of sounding cliche should I dump it? Bother bottling it?

 

[TheZymurgist]

The suck-back is caused by cooling. If the temperature drops, both the beer and the air inside the carboy contract, causing the pressure to drop, pulling in air (and liquid from the airlock.)

 

[RmikeVT]

While temperature shifts are normal and what you are seeing in the airlock is pretty standard if the temp or even barometric pressure change, the acidic taste is what gives me cause for concern. That sounds like infection. Could you be more specific about off-flavors? I

 

[dnslater]

The off flavors likely have nothing to do with the negative pressure in the vessel, as others have said. How long has the beer been fermenting? I would give it a month or more before I would judge it too harshly. I have even had 1 or 2 batches that tasted very metallic at bottling, but tasted fine 3 weeks later. Did you control fermentation temps? Exposure to sunlight?

 

[Minky]

This can happen anytime there is a drop in temperature. It causes lower air pressure inside the fermentation vessel. An active fermentation counteracts this, but it can be a problem before fermentation begins or after fermentation tapers off. I use a blow-off tube exclusively in order to avoid it.

 

[Angie25]

It spent 2 weeks in primary, it hasn't been exposed to sunlight, it was in a bucket for primary. I would save the taste very sour and vinegar.

 

[m00ps]

that batch is certainly infected. And if it's an unpleasant sourness that's worse, I doubt letting it ride for months is going to save it. Be prepared to wash the S**T out of that carboy and everything that touched the beer after pitching. Probably safest to toss the lines and siphons. You may be able to re-use the bucket, but I personally would rather shell out $15 for a new one and not risk ruining another batch.

Hopefully you can pinpoint where the infection came from to prvent it from happening again

 

[Angie25]

It's only my second batch, would my tubing and bucket really already be irrevocably infected?

 

[m00ps]

I dunno, depends on where you stored it and what kind of stuff its around. It could easily just be you forgetting to sanitize a small piece of equipment that touched the beer and that equipment had bacteria on it. The stuff's everywhere. I do everything in my kitchen and I get so paranoid about crap floating around in the air from cooking the night before. Not to mention the grain dust...

 

[dnslater]

It's only my second batch, would my tubing and bucket really already be irrevocably infected?

I would think you would be fine giving everything a good cleaning and soak in Starsan and hot water. Most of your equipment would still have very few scratches.......... it is the scratches in plastic surfaces that harbor bacteria.

You could also soak in a bleach water solution first.

Might think through your original process to a bit, to see if you can figure out where you went wrong. I am anal about sterilization and have not had an infection in my 40+ batches. Probably will get an infection in the next batch for typing this though.:cross:

 

[TheZymurgist]

I would think you would be fine giving everything a good cleaning and soak in Starsan and hot water. Most of your equipment would still have very few scratches.......... it is the scratches in plastic surfaces that harbor bacteria.

You could also soak in a bleach water solution first.

Might think through your original process to a bit, to see if you can figure out where you went wrong. I am anal about sterilization and have not had an infection in my 40+ batches. Probably will get an infection in the next batch for typing this though.:cross:

I would recommend the bleach option, or oxyclean free. It may discolor your tubing, but that doesn't really matter.

Whether or not you replace the equipment comes down to this: would you rather save the money on new equipment, and risk having another infected batch (at which point you've wasted both time and money on a batch of beer as well as having to shell out the money for the new equipment,) or would you rather have the piece of mind and replace the equipment up front?

Honestly, if it were me, I would probably do a bleach or oxyclean soak and wait to see what happened to my next batch. But that's just my opinion.