I am using an aquarium pump to aerate my cooled wort prior to pitching. All the parts are sanitized except for the air I’m blowing in. Should I be concerned with this and if so how do I address it?
I use an in-line air filter on my oxygenation setup. I can’t say that I had contamination problems without one, but it’s cheap insurance. Here’s something similar to what I have:
Thank you!
Definitely need to filter the air. A filter with a half micron rating is typically sufficient to filter wort spoilers from air.
And yet, people aerate by splashing, shaking, and stirring all the time. The air in the headspace of your fermenter is just that, unfiltered room air. One of the most popular starter methods is “shaken, not stirred”, which incorporates as much regular old air as possible by shaking. Once you get to the point of pitching enough healthy yeast for a starter or a given batch size, it’s going to out compete any stray microbes in the air.
I use an inline filter as cheap insurance for aerating but if I lost it I wouldn’t think twice about it.