Hey everyone, so i found a dryed up bat in my brew bucket....yeah my house is from 1835 but never had a problem with bats before. I been soaking the bucket in bleach for a few days this should be good correct. Funny question but i am a steril freak when it come to brewing.
IMO all you had to do was remove the bat and wash the bucket. Then sanitize as normal right before the next use. Soaking in bleach wasn't necessary, but if it makes you feel better, that's good I guess. Save the bat for dry-batting later.
You may also consider adding the dry bat near the tail end of primary fermentation; to allow the yeast to do some neat things with carcass flavoring.
The other option would be to make a tincture by soaking the bat in vodka or another spirit. Add at bottling to taste.
Nice one! Is it higher in Alpha acids or Batta acids? Would you ferment that bucket on the ground or hang it from the rafters? this could go on a long long time... no end in sight ..
Something almost like this happened to me. In my case, the bat didn't die in the bucket but he was hanging above it long enough to poop in it. Upon discovery, I bleached the bucket, rinsed throroughly, iodophored the bucket (figure that two sanitizers are better than one), brewed a brown ale, won a blue ribbon in the Wisconsin State Fare. The beer was known to some as Bat Shit Brown Ale, but entered as Special Brown Ale, for it's use Special Roast and Special B malts, of course. I also searched my basement until I discovered the ingress, which I boarded up, eliminating the bat problem I was experiencing in that house.
As everyone else has said, it's probably just the mental aspect more than anything. Just going through the normal sanitize process would have been fine. I store my buckets upside down after I discovered 2 very dead mice right before bottling day. I made an emergency run to the brew supply store and got my bigger bucket that I'm still using today (for small batches).
Throw a party. Leave the bat in the bucket and put a sign on it that says "puke bucket". Let the puke / bat concoction sit in the sun for a few days. Clean and sanitize the bucket. Then make beer.
Well, there's been smoked whale testicle beer before. Why not bat, right? Nothing is safe in the craft beer industry anymore!
On the bright side, you have a ton of options for beer names that come out of that fermenter. I had to clean out my kettle last week because of some unfortunate events, (really don't want to talk about it). I added water, 1/2 cup of bleach, and half a cup of vinegar to my 15 gal kettle. It was outside and I stood up wind because I knew I was dropping the pH of bleach. I brought this to a boil on my kettle. I dumped this and added a bunch of oxyclean and water to the kettle. Scrub, rinse rinse rinse. Done. I figure by taking the pH way down and way up I've killed everything I can. If it were a fermenter I wouldn't use boiling water, but the same practice. OUTSIDE!
