I recently purchased a Little Brew Demon Conical. I found this little nugget stashed away on their site. "Acid-based sanitizers,( i.e.: Star San ), are not recommended to sanitize our fermenters. Acid- based sanitizers will weaken and eventually eat through the plastic on the tap, plastic caps, and the fermenter." Question: Is this actually true? They recommend One Step as a Cleaner/Sanitizer, but have a bottle of Star San already. Does anyone else have a Brew Demon and do you use Star San with no problems?
Wow i didnt read that. I have that conical fermentor too and this is the 3rd batch i made with it and all 3 ive been using star san at the proper dilution. I dont know if its true but it is plastic. Im already thinking of moving into a glass carboy.
Ill start using one step instead of star san with this fermentor then, just in case. Is pretty cool even for bottling purposes
But One Step is only a cleaner, not a sanitizer right? Seems like there could be a small increase in risk of infection when only depending on it, especially in something like a fermenter.
"Eat through the plastic..." kinda sounds like horseshit. The BrewDemon site says the mini fermentor is made of PVC (wouldn't be my first choice, but hey, it's cheap!) PVC has good resistance to phosphoric acid (the primary ingredient in Star San, making up 50% of the product) even at relatively high concentrations (up to at least 40%). Star San also contains dodecylbenzenesulfonic acid (a surfactant often used to make detergents) at ~ 15%. At the working dilution of 1 oz in 5 gallons, it's about 0.08% phosphoric acid and 235 ppm dodecylbenzenesulfonate. 5 Star claims 300 ppm. My back-of-envelope math disagrees, but maybe they know something I don't regarding the 'proprietary' other 35% of the formulation? In any case, I'd not hesitate to use star san in that fermentor. I would not pour concentrated star san into it - either mix it in a separate vessel or at least fill the fermentor with water first then add it and mix well. I also wouldn't recommend storing it in there for any length of time (because it's hard to say if discoloration or clouding would occur over time w/o better knowledge of specifics about their polymer) - but the 2 minutes necessary to do its job? I can't imagine it being a real problem. Probably some kind of kickback deal from Logic (makers of One-Step).
See, I knew if I put this out there some science/math guy would jump in and give me real evidence as to why this would be true or not. Thank you sir. Since I got the little one (3gal) I will be cleaning my equipment and bottles in a separate container. I can just pour some of that in the conical and swish it around for a minute and then run some through the spigot and call it a day.
