Brewed a sweet stout on Saturday and used an airlock instead of a blow off tube which I should have know better not to do but anyway, came home yesterday and the lid was blown off. I figure the top could not have been off more than 12 hrs. The beer seemed to still be fermenting actively. I put a clean/sanitized lid on top and sealed it back up.
Has this ever happened where the beer still turned out good or is the chance for contamination/oxidation too high?
Don’t worry. Open fermentation isn’t the bugbear everyone thinks it is. I always just lay the lid on top of the bucket and no air-lock. Last batch the beer tried to crawl out of the fermenter but the lid just burped and some yeast flowed down the sides. No big deal except cleaning the fermenter will take a few minutes more.
I put a loose lid on my “open fermentations”(one of three of my fermenters is closed)…call it a dust cover. It stays there until active fermentation has ceased (beer starts to clear) and I am either near an expected terminal (or it has been sitting at terminal for a day)