Using Starsan as water bath for stainless fermenter?

[HeadyG]

Hi, I'm going to try to somewhat control the temperature of my fermentation for the first time by putting my Anvil stainless steel bucket fermenter in a water bath in a plastic keg bucket. I'm concerned about sanitation, especially since the fermenter has a ball valve spigot that I will need to use later on. I was thinking I could just fill the keg bucket with Starsan, but I wanted to make sure that there are no potential problems I have not considered with placing a stainless steel fermenter in Starsan for up to a week. Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks in advance.

 

[jddevinn]

You want to submerge, or mostly submerge, the fermenter?

'Swamp coolers' (amount of water with a shirt/ect hanging in the water and wrapped around the fermenter) work due to the water in the cloth evaporating. I don't think submerging in water is going t hep you control temp...... and the fermenter might try to float away.

 

[Coastalbrew]

I use an open water bath with my plastic fermenter bucket all the time. I keep ice packs in the water bath around the bucket and it keeps my fermentation temps within a couple of degrees no problem. I can easily hold temps in the high 50's to mid 60's or wherever my recipe requires. I keep the water level at or just slightly above the wort level and floatation is not an issue.

That said, my bucket does not have any ports and I do not use star san for the bath. I would worry about pressure in the bath pushing through the valve or visa versa. Also it is my understanding that star san is only effective as a sanitizer as long as the ph stays within a certain range and that the ph in the solution changes over time. I would not trust the solution to stay sanitary throughout the length of fermentation, and would not use the valve to transfer the beer without additional cleaning and sanitation. I'd transfer with a racking cane.

 

[HeadyG]

OK thank you for the perspective. I'm thinking I should wrap the ball valve up tight with a couple baggies and rubber bands before submerging to keep it sanitary.

 

[Coastalbrew]

Anvil makes a chilling system for the buckets that is pretty reasonably priced. That would be a better solution in my opinion.

 

[marc1]

Open buckets of starsan stay good for a long time. I think it would be fine. When I used the fermenter in a big bucket of water method I would sometimes add k-meta to the water to keep it from getting funky. Starsan would probably be better.

 

[FromZwolle]

acids on metal aren't generally a great idea. if you're concerned with the water getting icky, i'd dose it with iodophor or whatever iodine solution you have. it will denature and/or lose it's antimicrobial properties in uv/02 exposure over time, but it's easy enough to splash another squirt once a week.

 

[jddevinn]

This still is not going to cool anything by itself unless you add ice/ice pack/ect , it will just act as a buffer.

 

[HeadyG]

Yes, I have ice packs I will use to cool the water.

 

[marc1]

acids on metal aren't generally a great idea. if you're concerned with the water getting icky, i'd dose it with iodophor or whatever iodine solution you have. it will denature and/or lose it's antimicrobial properties in uv/02 exposure over time, but it's easy enough to splash another squirt once a week.

Starsan on stainless is fine. It can be mixed up and kept in kegs for months.

 

[BigDave1303]

Personally I wouldn't bother with putting starsan in the chill water. Apart from the valve on your fermentor there is no reason to sanitise the outside, it's only surfaces that the wort is in contact with that need sanitising. I would carry on as you are and sanitise the spigot just before bottling/kegging.
I would also consider putting a plastic tap on the plastic container. That way, when the ice has melted you could drain it off & add more ice to maintain the cooling.

 

[matt_m]

I've done a keg in a cooler with a sous vide cooker for holding high temps for kviek and it worked very well but no fittings were submerged. When pulling a sample I have gotten some blowoff in the bath quickly resulting in a little funkiness but a dribble of Starsan cleared that up leading me to believe that a weak Starsan solution might be all you need to keep it from growing anything. Covering the valve to keep stuff out and a good spray with sanitizer at the end would probably be safe. You might consider heading to the auto parts store and buying some vacuum caps to keep anything from getting inside.

 

[FromZwolle]

Starsan on stainless is fine. It can be mixed up and kept in kegs for months.

while i do believe you, my paranoid mind would never let me do that.

 

[bruce_the_loon]

I posted a long chemistry discourse on the Perlick 650ss H2S thread about how leaving StarSan sitting in 303 SS faucets will slowly corrode the stainless steel. It also corrodes 304 stainless steel. It won't hurt the beer as such, but there is a slow corrosion that happens.

I'd follow the idea of sealing the valve in plastic and then spraying with StarSan once you are done fermenting.

 

[HeadyG]

Personally I wouldn't bother with putting starsan in the chill water. Apart from the valve on your fermentor there is no reason to sanitise the outside, it's only surfaces that the wort is in contact with that need sanitising. I would carry on as you are and sanitise the spigot just before bottling/kegging.
I would also consider putting a plastic tap on the plastic container. That way, when the ice has melted you could drain it off & add more ice to maintain the cooling.

Thank you, this is helpful. I have a bunch of reusable ice packs in the freezer that I will be using to cool the water. It will be in my basement, so it's already a steady 66-67 degrees, but about a month ago I had a pumpkin ale in the same fermenter down there in the ambient air and the fermometer was reading 75 degrees at the peak (beer turned out delicious though). I'm using WLP001 to brew a milk stout tomorrow and I'm hoping that if I keep the outside water consistently around the ambient temperature I should be able to keep it within the yeast's optimal range inside the fermenter until I'm ready to take it out and let it warm up some. Controlling the temp in any way is a big step forward for me so I'm excited to see how it goes. Thanks a lot.

 

[HeadyG]

I posted a long chemistry discourse on the Perlick 650ss H2S thread about how leaving StarSan sitting in 303 SS faucets will slowly corrode the stainless steel. It also corrodes 304 stainless steel. It won't hurt the beer as such, but there is a slow corrosion that happens.

Interesting, thanks for this. Do you think having the fermenter in the starsan for a maximum of one week counts as prolonged? I may take it out as soon as the bubbles in the blowoff jar show clear signs of slowing down, which is usually after a few days in my experience. Or maybe I will just use water and avoid the whole issue.

 

[Coastalbrew]

I have a bunch of reusable ice packs in the freezer that I will be using to cool the water

Be careful with those reusable ice packs. I use those as well and have had a couple of them leak the gel into my water bath. Not the end of the world, but the water gets gross.

 

[HeadyG]

Be careful with those reusable ice packs. I use those as well and have had a couple of them leak the gel into my water bath. Not the end of the world, but the water gets gross.

Mine are brand new so I hope that doesn't happen this time!

 

[bruce_the_loon]

Interesting, thanks for this. Do you think having the fermenter in the starsan for a maximum of one week counts as prolonged? I may take it out as soon as the bubbles in the blowoff jar show clear signs of slowing down, which is usually after a few days in my experience. Or maybe I will just use water and avoid the whole issue.

I would say more a few hours would be prolonged exposure. The passivation techniques call for a citric acid bath of about an hour to properly prepare the surface for passivation, so a week or so would be seriously prolonged.

 

[user 272106]

I've left stainless steel parts (tri clamp barbs, butterfly valves, clamps themselves, etc.) in a bucket of starsan for months without issue (with a lid to keep flies away in garage). Ph kept below 3.5 the entire time. Wasn't my intention to do so at the time, but no harm came of it.

 

[HeadyG]

Just an update on how it went: Very successful! I ended up using about six gallons of Star San as a water bath for my stainless Anvil bucket fermenter in a plastic keg bucket. I triple-wrapped the sanitized ball valve spigot in regular plastic sandwich baggies and rubber bands. I left the fermenter in the bath for almost 72 hours, adding a small ice pack to the Star San roughly every four hours (two packs for overnight) and kept the sanitizer at a pretty steady 62.0 to 63.5 degrees for the duration, mostly on the lower end of that scale. It worked great, certainly nothing noticeably bad happened to the steel or the beer inside. Once the bubbling in the airlock really slowed down, I took the fermenter out of the bath and am currently letting it warm up to the ambient temp in the basement, which is varying from about 65.5 to 67 during this cold stretch in Minnesota. In a couple days I may bring it upstairs to finish up, where I've been keeping the thermostat set at 70. The spigot got a little wet in the bath but I sprayed the hell out of it with sanitizer and I think it's all good. Most importantly, I took a sample of my Left Hand Milk Stout clone (using WLP001), which went from 1.46 to 1.16 in that nearly 72-hour period, and it tastes great. I hope to still get it down to about 1.008 or so before I add some liquid cacao, homemade vanilla extract and coffee to it. My crappy efficiency is the next problem I intend to tackle. It was only about 60% this time, perhaps my worst-ever, but I have some ideas why.