My wife recently took over one of our large stainless steel pots as a dye pot. I had forgotten this, and boiled some mash water in it for an all-grain beer batch I’m brewing. She hadn’t been dyeing in it for very long (a few small batches of fabric) and I couldn’t see any dye residue (else I would never have used it). How deadly is this? Should I chuck the beer?
Here’s the dye MSDS data, FYI: (it’s the iDye products)
Best-case scenario: She cleaned it good after each use, and you cleaned it before you used it, so it’s clean.
Medium-case scenario: Funny-tasting purple beer.
My advice: It’s just proto-beer. Toss it and start over. In the meantime, order a brew kettle with a detachable spigot and hide the spigot when not in use. This kept my wife from using a 7 gallon brewpot to burn a batch of spaghetti because she couldn’t be bothered to clean one of the other pots.
I don’t know much about the economics of making beer, but if finishing the batch is not too expensive (in time or money), I’d go ahead. If the yeast lives through it, then I’d guess it’s clean enough. If you don’t want to use your yeast this way, then dump it.
Was it rinsed out at least once between dying and brewing? Then I wouldn’t worry. The amount of dye left on the pot will be minuscule, and then diluted by gallons of water.
ETA: The dye is meant for clothing, right? It’s not like it’s lead or Mercury or radioactive.
ETA2: Even for ingesting the undilluted product, it’s not that scary. For example:
Problem made moot: I let the mash run its course, but the gravity of the resulting wort was so low, I just gave up this time. (I think the grain was too old; I had meant to do it last summer, but we had a family emergency and I was out of town half of last year.)
Thanks for the input, folks. Knew I could count on you. I’ll let you know how the next (non-toxic) batch turns out.
