I was transferring my Blonde from primary to secondary to be able to cold crash it and rush the kegging process and I noticed a crane fly made it in there. Has anyone else had bugs this late in the process? I am assuming that it really cant hurt anything, but I’m wondering if anyone has experience with this?
Is it like the pic shows? Did it drop in there during racking to 2ndry?
Is it in one piece floating on top (hope) or is it submerged? Probably the “most” risk is in the retrieval. Whatever you use to pick it out should be sanitized. If submerged you could use a sanitized racking cane, hold finger over top end and then using a “pipette” method suck it up into the racking cane.
Probably plenty of alcohol in there now to make it not much of a concern. My opinion…
I think you can get a variance on the 15 second rule on this. :lol:
Good Luck!
Brew On
Yes, it is a crane fly, also known as a Mosquito Eater.
I am not going to pull it out, I don’t think fishing around for it will be beneficial, when I keg I will make sure I don’t transfer it, but if it is going to do any damage, it would have already been done.
Just wondering if anyone else has lost some bug to your beer and what happened.
I have been fortunate to not have had bugs in the beer, at least ones I can see.
What a way to go for the bug. We should all hope for that type of ending when it comes. Better than a windshield.
Have a good one :!:
Brew On
Unfortunately, from this point on, you can’t serve it to any vegans. :lol:
When I was serving at the NAOBF back on the first a couple asked the server next to me if the beer was vegan. I almost send them down the table to the bacon brown ale line.
If it does get “dispensed” just tell the lucky guest it’s the homebrew version of the worm. The Chinese herbalist consider the Crane Fly to be an aphrodisiac. :twisted:
I’ve had a fruit fly end up in my bottling bucket before. It didn’t make it into any bottles, and there were no noticeable effects.
My guess is that the alcohol is keeping the beer safe. If it had fallen into the primary, I’d be more concerned, but I’d probably still try to let it ride.
Secondary? No. HLT, MLT, kettle, sanitizer bucket, inverted draining caryboy? All of the above. I don’t think it’d hurt anything but I would remove it. Just sanitize and implement and yoink it out of there.
Kegged it yesterday, when I was cleaning out the carboy I made sure to dump it through a strainer. No bug in the keg. It was funny how concerned I was initially. But I figured fishing around for it would just introduce more oxygen and other baddies, so I opted to let it soak for a week.
[quote=“Rookie L A”]Unfortunately, from this point on, you can’t serve it to any vegans.[/quote]Depending on how serious the vegan is and how far they go down the food chain in defining a living being, unfiltered beer could be off the menu given the yeast.
The only vegan 've ever had much contact with was at a job I had 10 years ago or so. The guy was so listless and non energetic I wondered how he ever got out of bed in the morning. He quit to work at a movie theatre collecting tickets, at more than two dollars less an hour because it was all he could handle.
Well… at least you could rename your Blonde as “Drunk Crane-Fly Blonde” or something awesome like that. 
