Got up at 5am to do an All Grain 5gallon batch. Everything was going well until the chill. I lifted up the floating thermometer to see where I was at and saw the inside slide out. It had cracked/broke and the contents of my thermometer were now inside my chilling wort.
I dumped all 5+ gals of wort. Mega-Fail.

I texted my buddy and he donated some leftover grain and his grain mill, I picked up my Premier Malt Extract.

I have no idea what is in these grains, because he couldn't remember. I know there is Pilsner, Munich, CaraPils, and Pale Malt. Going to do a partial mash and use up some PME and .6oz Saaz and .5oz Cluster.

NO CLUE how this will turn out. Using some Saflager23 and sticking it in the shed to lager for 2-3 weeks.

Uggh. Hopefully it's tolerable. But it definitely won't be repeatable. LOL

Trying to turn a bad day into a Better Day.

Good luck Bob. That kind of loss is heartbreaking.

A similar thing happened to me last night when I was kegging my Ordinary Bitter, and trying to take a gravity sample. Hydrometer fell into the keg, the bottom cracked and I got those damn steel beads and glass all in my beer!

Rather than do the smart thing, and dump the two or so gallons I had transferred, I sanitized a large steel strainer and strained the glass and steel shot out.

Then, to counter the oxidation that could result from this aeration, I added about 100 grams of wheat DME. I also hooked CO2 up to the bev out line, to try and bubble any dissolved o2 up out of the wort. Hopefully reproducing yeasties eating the DME and the scrubbing via CO2 will do the trick. If not, hey...it's a bitter. A bit of oxidation isn't out of place.

It's now sitting in the living room with the vent on the cornie locked open so it can ferment the rest of the way out...both the DME, and because I don't think the yeasties were done in the first place.

I decided not to take any chances with those lil beeds.
The thermometer that I had was old (80's...??) and so I thought they might be lead based.

Mash is going well on this one.
Doing a Mash In a Bag In a Cooler type thing.

I hear ya', better safe than sorry.

Of course, the two times this has happened to me (once with a floating thermometer like you, and now again with my hydrometer), I strained the wort/beer and attempted to save it.

No ill effects from the first one (not that I've noticed yet, anwyay), so I'm hoping for the same kind of results this time.

OG: 1.068

I probably severely underpitched the yeast. But to be honest, I don't give a flying underside of a vermin. At this point, I am just glad it's all over with.

Maybe I'll just use this batch to harvest the yeast from and make a really nice, crisp, English style lager.

Cheers!

best of luck...could be a happy mistake in the end?

and like you said, at least you'll get some yeast out of the deal!

Thermometers from that time usually had mercury in them. If it had a silver metal for the temperature reading, it's mercury - just as bad or worse than lead. It's a good thing you dumped the batch. Better safe than sorry.

It was red on the inside. On top of that, the glass had busted so there were shards of broken glass that could be potentially as bad.

I just don't think ANY beer is with a trip to a hospital.

Starting to see a little bit of activity. A good sign since I never made a starter for the washed yeast.

It's a tad on the high side, so I stuck a colder blue ice pack into the cooler (Fermentation Chamber). Try to get the temps in the low-mid 50's.

Just took a gravity reading of this.
1.014. Woohoo! Not bad for No Starter.

This puts this at around 7%ABV. What a kicker!

The taste was good, but I am thinking it had a tad bit of an alcohol kick to it. Not sure how/why, considering this fermented at about 55F.

I am going to transfer this to my second LBK and let it clear up. It had all sorts of floaties that I was not happy about.

The color was dark for a maibock (maybe out of guidelines), but the taste was still decently good. Used old grains that had been crushed and sat in a bag for awhile, also a can of PME.

I'm happy. It's a pipeline filler.

I bottled this up today.

It had lots of floaties still in it.
I put the hydro sample in a glass in the fridge. After about 30mins, I noticed it had all settled to the bottom of the glass. It was quite refreshing. Probably won't be my favorite style, but was decent.

Bottle primed.