Monumental blow-off tube suck-back

[seriousbeef]

I just put a 1 gal batch of light German style beer into cold-crash on friday.
I had it hooked up in a growler, with a bung, blow off tube to a beer bottle with about 250ml of water + a teaspoon of a powdered, oxygen based sanitiser we use here in the UK. As you do. I usually cold crash with 3 piece or S bend style airlock, so I am not fussed if it does suck back, its only sucking back in a tiny drop of vodka. But considering I had another growler on the go, I had to resort to this.

Basically, it's sucked all 250ml into the beer due to the negative pressure or whatever you want to call it. 250ml seems like a lot ratio wise for a 1 gal batch. Is it worth bottling? I can only imagine it tasting disgusting.

 

[kh54s10]

So that would make the suck back about 15% of your beer. Sounds like a dumper to me.

 

[jro238]

I would at least wait till fermentation/crash is done and taste it before I dumped.

 

[HopSong]

Wow, what could have sucked that much back.. did you have a huge headspace? Was the growler well below the beer? If not, it might have created a siphon.

 

[Bobby_M]

I think the key is to have enough tubing, with sufficient diameter, so that if liquid is sucked up about half way to the top bend, that the opening of the tubing would no longer be submerged. This can be done by only filling your catch vessel with very little liquid and using a larger tube. The downside is that ambient air will get through as the liquid falls out of the tube, but it's better than putting that liquid directly into the beer.