My theory is correct, something always happens unexpectedly on a brew day. I forgot to drain the sanitizer out of one of my carboys before racking.
It was approxiamately 2 cups of properly diluted Star San, with distilled water. I’ve got app. 5.5 gallons of wort in the carboy now.
Thoughts? I know phosphoric acid is actually good for the yeast and found in a lot of soda’s, but is this too much concentration? And is the distilled water contaminated from sanitizing the vessel? I’ve always heard don’t reuse sanitizer once you’ve sanitized something, that’s why I make the last comment.
I’m going to ferment it out, just want to know what to expect!
2 cups in 5.5 gallons? That’s nothing. There was an article about an experiment a while back where some guys intentionally put starsan in a split batch and they could not tell the difference between the two. Something to that effect. But you don’t need to worry about this case.
I would have no concerns at all. I usually leave a 6.5 gallon bucket around for at least a month or so full of Star San mix and use the vessels it sits in many times with no issues at all. Once the pH of the star san changes and it is no longer viable I dump it but I usually get a few brew days out of it easily
I wouldn’t think that such a small quantity would be a big deal. The guy who works at my LHBS and started a nano brewery told me that some brewers literally spray-bottle Starsan over the top of their beer after pitching the yeast and before sealing the fermentor.
So I guess the logic for spraying star san on top is to kill airborne bacteria and wild yeast that may have settled on the surface of the wort in the few seconds that the lid/bung was removed. I would think the star san would be diluted with wort long before the required 30 or 60 second contact time. Has anyone else heard of this technique? I can’t make sense of it.
