A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.
Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.
Some starting points for beginners:
Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine
What liquid to use in an airlock
I use Starsan since I already have it ready from cleaning everything else, but have used water when I forgot to save some. I've never had anything go funky either way.
If you're worried about sanitizer losing effectiveness, you can change it out wherever you want, but it's always going to be cleaner than water with no sanitizer. I just change it when I rack.
Dish soap just seems like a way to end up drinking soapy booze.
I also use starsan and it's mostly a contamination concern if you ever get the liquid drawn through the airlock into the fermentor (like when manipulating plastic containers and such). So far I've seen some dead fruit flies in my starsan up there for longer ferments and still no issues with the resulting beer.
OP does say he uses a different sanitizer further in the thread, and that is less stable than phosphoric acid so there's a chance it'll just turn into water at some point.
Still, homebrewing is mostly about having fun with it, so no sense overstressing about ir.
I agree. I usually make 1 or 0.5 gallon wines, so if I ever had to toss anything, no biggie. If I was making big, complicated batches or something with expensive ingredients, I'm sure I'd worry more about it. But I think by that point if you were into that kind stuff, you'd have enough supplies to not have to worry about it anyway. Hydrometer is about as fancy as I get!
The same SO~2~ solution I use to sanitise my equipment. While not strictly necessary during the fermentation, as the CO~2~ from the fermentation is already displacing oxygen, It prevents oxygen from getting in after the fermentation has ended.