My friend and I made our first attempt at an all grain brew this weekend and things didn’t go to plan!!!
I am on a well and the water is very hard so we decided to use distilled water and add the appropriate pack of AccuMash from NB. However, in all the excitement we forgot to add the AccuMash!!!
OG pre-boil was around .030 vs. target of .046. So we added some DME to bring it up.
It was a really windy day an we just couldn’t get a really good rolling boil.
We testing the gravity after the boil the hydrometer broke (shattered) and dropped a small amount of the lead shot into the wort!!! The hydrometer was in a ‘wine thief’ so it was only 10 or so lead shot balls (in a 15 gallon batch) that got through but I only noticed them when I was cleaning out the kettle later.
So I’m thinking I’ll just ferment as normal and the taste a sample once fermentation is finished. If it tastes OK (no obvious off flavors) we’ll carry and and see how things turn out. If it has noticeable off flavors then we’ll dump it and put it down to experience.
Any thoughts / suggestions on how we might ‘rescue’ this batch.
Do you think there might be a chance that some of that lead is still in the beer? If yes, you might want to dump it. It doesn’t take much lead to contaminate something to a worrying level, and I’m guessing that an acidic solution like wort would dissolve it reasonably efficiently.
If there are no minerals in the water (especially calcium), it can make it difficult for the enzymes to convert the starches to sugars. A pH that is off, which is likely with no minerals present, can do the some thing. This might be the cause of your low efficiency, though that is more commonly influenced by you set up and the grain crush.
The pH also can have a big impact on the taste of the beer, and minerals are used to balance the effects of different malts. If you brew a dark beer with just distilled water, it won’t come out very good.
And even when the pH is ok, mineral content also has an impact on the beer taste. It is a very complex subject. Download a copy of Bru’n Water and read up on it.
Most lead testers I’ve seen are sticks that you swipe in a surface…may be hard to do with beer. In addition, unless there’s a fair amount of lead in the beer it probably wouldn’t show up. Lastly, AFAIK, those balls aren’t lead.
]I would bet that the metal in your hydrometer is steel or tungsten or some other relatively inert material, rather than lead or some other toxic metal. Manufacturers these days are shying away from using toxic substances for anything food or water related, though I’m betting there are still a few older hydrometers floating around out there (pun intended) that have lead in them.
On the other hand, assuming your hydrometer did have lead in it, as long as you got it out of your wort in a reasonable amount of time, I’m sure no harm was done. And, you can test the metal to see if it’s lead. First, try picking it up with a magnet to see if it’s iron or steel. Then, if the magnet won’t pick it up, try squeezing one of the balls with a pliers. If it’s lead, it’ll deform pretty easily.
