Hello Retta, 

Thanks for your question! Yes, following USDA and National Center for Home Food Preservation guidelines, I would recommend disposing of your beans. I know that canning takes time, effort, and money, so I would not lightly recommend that you throw out food that you spent so many resources to preserve. However, there is a genuine safety concern with low acid food (like beans) that were canned without following a researched, safe process. Botulism poisoning, which is often caused by improperly canned low acid foods, can cause paralysis and/or death, and we cannot treat it lightly.

To can low-acid foods (meats, beans, vegetables) safely, we have to use a pressure canner to heat the food inside the jar to 240 degrees for a specified amount of time, which will kill the bacteria that can cause botulism poisoning. Different foods heat at different rates, depending on their density, moisture, etc. Hydrated beans and dehydrated beans especially will heat at very different rates, and the procedures that have been researched to date all involve starting with beans that have been soaked and partially cooked for 30 minutes before they go in the jar. If you start with a dried bean, there is no guarantee that you can rehydrate and heat the bean to 240 degrees within the processing time.  

The best resources for finding recipes that have been thoroughly researched for safety are the USDA, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, and university-based Extension Services. The Ball company also conducts internal research on their recipes and they vouch for their safety. In future, I would recommend you follow one of the attached publications for canning beans.

Because your canned beans carry the risk of live botulinum spores within them, you should treat them as hazardous. Do not serve them. We recommend marking the lids "DO NOT EAT" and bagging in a black trash bag before throwing away. If you want to save the jars, you should follow a detoxification procedure to protect yourself. That procedure is quite involved, but the steps are described in the Canning Vegetables publication attached.

Thanks again for your question,

Jared