So can I syphon the beer under the pellicle and rack to a secondary?
So can I syphon the beer under the pellicle and rack to a secondary?
Nobody will shoot you if you do. A jail term would not be in your future. There have been a LOT of people here who have tried, some may even report success.
HOWEVER, every step you carry out from here on would just expose more of your equipment to that infection. Racking cane, tubing, secondary vessel... and if you carried it to bottling then it's the bottling bucket as well. Even if you did manage to adequately clean most of that equipment, all it takes is one piece to squeak by, and the infection will keep coming up again and again.
I know it sucks to lose a bucket, the cost of the materials, and a day of brewing time. That said, my vote would be to get rid of it, avoid spending even more time and money on a brew that has gone to the Dark Side, and start over with a fresh fermenter.
SILVER LINING: It's only September 26. You have three months to try to brew it again and still have it ready by Christmas.
So can I syphon the beer under the pellicle and rack to a secondary?
And I wouldn't discard your fermenter as suggested by others. I think as a group we tend to blindly repeat "prior advice" and quite alot of questionable advice gets passed along as law. I would sanitize it with a proper bleach solution and put it back into rotation. I readily use my plastic fermenters for sours with proper sanitation and I have never had an infected beer I could attribute to the equipment (and I have only ever had two in my 4+ years of brewing).
My advice is based on personal experience. I had tried everything to sanitize plastic after an infection. To no avail. I had a string of several batches go sour on me after the first one before I finally got smart enough to throw away the bucket and buy new ones. No problems after that.
Just as a side question: anyone ever try boiling water (or nearly boiling) to sterilize a plastic fermenter? It probably wouldn't work with a Better Bottle or Big Mouth Bubbler, but a bucket or one of the fermenters the OP had would probably survive the heat...
I've seen pics on hbt of deformed BBs due to "excessive thermal exposure"
btw, that's an awesome looking pellicle. I'd be inclined to set it aside and taste what develops.
Looking at what the "wild" brewing group on hbt seems to go for (and lemme say that some of their pellicles make me gag ) that could be a winner...
Cheers!
Just as a side question: anyone ever try boiling water (or nearly boiling) to sterilize a plastic fermenter? It probably wouldn't work with a Better Bottle or Big Mouth Bubbler, but a bucket or one of the fermenters the OP had would probably survive the heat...
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