Plastic & Hot Liquid

[earlnicholas]

Was making some strawberry wine & had heated my water with strawberries up to boiling & introduced sugar. Not long after it, I got eager and went ahead and transferred the hot solution into an HDPE bucket. It hadn’t been boiling for a few minutes and I am sure it was under 100 Celsius, but should I be concerned about continuing to use the bucket? Can the hot liquid leach plastics from the HDPE bucket?
Normally I’m more patient than this but I ran out of room to dissolve sugar in the pot & transferred some to the bucket to make room so I rushed it.

 

[YAPN]

My guess would be...probably not. But a good way of sterilizing the bucket!

 

[MHB]

HDPE is fine, it’s what all (I hope) the no-chill cubes people use are made of.
It isn’t so much the case of plastic being leached out as additives called plasticisers that keep the plastic from being too ridged and brittle.
The main plasticiser used in HBPE is Citric Acid and it’s pretty tightly tied into the PE, so not really a concern.
Mark

 

[Matty Groves]

I found out I didn’t have my immersion chiller with me when brewing a pacific ale once and worried about this…
I read it should be ok if it was under boiling and transferred into a classic HDPE bucket fermenter at 98C. Sadly I was burping up a weird plastic taste once I started drinking the beer - the sh.tload of galaxy only really masked the aroma.

I reckon it was the bucket because it smelt a bit plastic-y afterwards, but I also thought perhaps it was because of the little plastic bung thing (where you screw in the tap) which might not be HDPE?

Anyway, I wait until the wort is in the 70s now before transferring to fermenter.
Hopefully yours turns out great though