Beer Forum

ok.. i just brewed 10gs of octoberfest. i used morebeers silicone tubing to transfer from the kettle to the fermenter. the tubing had been sitting for sometime in starsan.. i would say at least a good months or more. when it came time to transfer i just took the tubing out of the starsan, drained it, and threw it on there. so after about 2 minutes i noticed there was some white powdery stuff all over the tubing. the starsan evaperated and left this. what is it? did i leave the silicone in the starsan to long? what about if some got into the beer from the inside of the tube? there was alot of that shit. what kind of off flavers can i expect? any help would be nice. thanks guy

tom

If you used plain tap water when you mixed that, the StarSan will precipitate out some of the bicarbonate salts, which does 2 things: 1) it increases the pH of the solution and forms scale, and 2) it starts to lose its sanitizing power - so you have some scale on the tubing (relatively harmless really, it's not like you are dealing with pounds of the stuff), and maybe a not-as-sterile-as-you-thought piece of tubing.

cool... thanks. so its all good... or almost all good wich is close enough to me!

You should be fine. I have extremely hard tap water from my well, it tastes fine so I don't worry about it but it will start to cloud up a Star San solution relatively fast. I switched over to using Iodophor for my bulk sanitizing which doesn't have that same effect. It stains plastic and tubing a nice shade of orange, which I can live with and doesn't burn my hands like StarSan does when dunking stuff in and out of the bucket on brew day. I still use Star San mixed iwth bottled or distilled water for keg sanitizing, cleaning our draught lines, in a spray bottle etc.

Either works, but eventually time is your enemy with a solution of StarSan so just plan accordingly and sanitize on an as neede dbasis when you need the tubing and you'll be fine

this is the first time its done it to me. i've left it in for weeks befor and nothing. but i guess a month or more is just to long with my water. i'll just remember that in the future