Wort saved for starter issue

[peebee]

Food factories don't comply with anything like the standards of, say, clean rooms for putting together space-craft. Nor sterile (we hope!) operating theatres in Hospitals. And they get caught out occasionally.

Minor digressions can be got away with because, well, humans are pretty resilient.

 

[MashBag]

And people forget, yeast works hard at 'cleaning up'

 

[JockyBrewer]

You say "Sanitising" (one nine, 99.9%, if I remember rightly?) is probably far more than the majority of us achieve and is more than adequate. Beer-brewing at home is not a life-or-death situation."
My point is that sanitising is fine for brewing, but here I am talking about food preservation. In brewing we only need 99.9% because the yeast will soon overpower any remaining bugs in the fermenter and starve them of oxygen so they can't multiply (assuming suitable pitch rate is observed). For food preservation, any small amounts of bacteria would be free to multiply if oxygen is available and this could lead to the wort being spoilt over a moderate length of time.

Correct - consider every batch of wort to be infected at some level. Brewers get past that by pitching an overwhelming amount of brewing yeast that quickly modify the wort environment to be hostile to anything else before it can take hold.

You also said "I read your description of "sanitising" your PET bottle and you, like hordes of other homebrewers, simply weren't following the instructions for the sanitizer you were using ("Starsan")."
Apart from not cleaning my brand new coopers pet bottle with something like PBW or VWP what did I not follow regarding the Starsan instructions?

I guess you could have cleaned it with PBW first, although I wouldn't expect there to be any organic soil on there to hide bugs. You could have also used a more powerful sanitiser (e.g. iodophor), although the simplest option would probably have been to freeze your PET bottle.

If you want to store without freezing then as others have suggested you could get into pressure cooking concentrated wort for starters:

 

[peebee]

I can't find reference to that "n-many nines" stuff regarding sterilization and sanitation. So, ignore it; I'd probably found some twaddle. Sterilising is more thorough than sanitising ... I think we all got that.

 

[Steveski]

I can't find reference to that "n-many nines" stuff regarding sterilization and sanitation. So, ignore it; I'd probably found some twaddle. Sterilising is more thorough than sanitising ... I think we all got that.

Maybe you read the book "Yeast" by Chris White, it is described as this on page 165....

Sanitize 99.9%
Disinfect 99.999%
Sterilize 100%

 

[peebee]

Thanks very much. That'll be it!

So, suspicions confirmed ... twaddle!



(Well ... a smart Alec like Chris White must know "100%" isn't being serious).

 

[peebee]

Talking of PBW:

... You could have also used a more powerful sanitiser (e.g. iodophor) ...

I was quite surprised grubbing about for stuff to back up my comments (I do research my answers, honest, ... usually, ... sometimes), Hydrogen peroxide (3-20%) gets a higher effectiveness rating than Cl- (bleach) (and iodine, etc.). Sodium percarbonate (in PWB) breaks down to hydrogen peroxide. Although I use higher concentrations than PWB instructions and always hot, but I remain quite unsure of the concentration of hydrogen peroxide I can achieve. 5% gets assumed?

High concentrations are an advantage of buying Percarbonate in bulk. Although I do hear it gets blamed (not proven?) for house fires?

It is odourless, but the spent solution (washing soda, or sodium carbonate, solution) has that distinct smell of washing machines. I never use it "no-rinse".

 

[peebee]

I was quite surprised grubbing about for stuff to back up my comments ...

I dug up that article:

It was from:

https://mycoscience.com/sterilization-vs-sanitization-vs-disinfection/
I usually prefer something more "academic" and "local". Seems I was having a wider search. The above table missed out the iodine stuff:

Bleach (hypochlorite) doesn't come over as great: "Best for floor cleaning"! But I am troubled by these non-academic articles ... what they say is bad is what they don't sell or make money from!