I brewed the cheer beer Sunday morning than ran to our friends house with the wife to babysit their two girls for the evening (the saying no good deed goes unpunished came to mind). We come back around midnight to find that in the course of about 12 hours the yeast has blown the air lock out, sprayed beer in a relatively amazing pattern, and overflowed all over the carpet. More than a little aggravated we cleaned what we thoughts was everything up until on my drive home last night I was thinking “what happened to the airlock?!”
I found it! In my loft, 12 feet up! To my amazement I looked up at the 18 foot vaulted and found a little spot on the white ceiling where the airlock had hit the ceiling and left a mess…which I then promptly cleaned up. It’s possible the airlock didn’t actually hit the ceiling but beyond a doubt some beer did.
So in trying to make lemonade out of lemons, lets see you beat that! I shot beer/the airlock 18 feet into air with yeast pitched only 12 hours earlier!!!
Can’t say I’ve had anything quite that exciting happen with my brewing. This is about all that comes close. It turned out to be a great Oatmeal RIS but the mess was a bit concerning… Cheers!!!
Is your fermentation temp elevated? Often times a really intense fermentation like that is caused by a high fermentation temp, which isn’t great for the beer.
+1. this sounds like a case of warm fermentation temp to me, possibly coupled with high pitching temp. What temp is the beer fermenting at (keeping in mind that the fermentation temp itself will be several degrees warmer than ambient) and what temp do you pitch the yeast?
+1
This has happened to me so many times, I stopped keeping track.
It’s not always high temps that does it.
Basically, any time you get a good, vigorous fermentation that is able to clog your airlock, you’ve got the potential.
I’ve resorted to using blow-off tubes for probably 90% of my primaries, these days.
I had a strawberry mead blow the carboy cap off for 3 days or so. Woke up Monday morning to find pinkish foam all over the carpet. Cleaned it up, put a clean cap and tube on, went to work, came home and cleaned up more foam. Rinse and repeat the next couple days. Ended up being extremely delicious without even aging it.
I’m thinking this might just be the sales pitch i use to explain to the wife why homebrewing is worth the effort and energy!
To answer another question the yeast was pitched at 73F, i don’t have a refrigerator for fermentation (hopefully Santa is reading), but with the AC on it’s 70F, which i know is a little warm but i haven’t had issues before. The OG was super high though, .082, so with a good starter, high OG, and a smaller than should have been used carboy i had it coming :-\
I hate to break it to you but that’s gonna be way too warm. 70 degree ambient means the beer might be fermenting at 78. If you pitched at 73 the temp may have never dropped down to 70 and it may even be fermenting at 80. You can add 4-8 degrees to ambient temp. You never should pitch most ales over 70 degrees and you want to keep the temp of most ales at 68 (70-72 at the very highest!) which means you need a way to have the ambient temp in the low 60s.
I understand that you say you “haven’t had a problem before” but I honestly think that if you tasted you beer fermented at cooler temps you would agree with me that there is an improvement. You may even be blown away at the improvment.
You don’t have to have a refrigerator, a “swamp cooler” in which you immerse the fermenter in a water batch and cycle out frozen water bottles works very well. Be sure to stick a “Fermometer” or stick on thermo on your fermenter so that you have an idea what the actual temp of the fermenting beer is. Fermentation temp is one of the most critical aspects of brewing. It is essential to consistency!
Also, if you pitch a bit cooler, say around 64-66 and keep fermentation temp between 66 and 68 for most ales you will have less issues with blow offs.
While I agree a temp controlled fridge or freezer is the best option there’s no need to wait for Christmas. You probably have a bucket big enough to immerse your fermenter in now and frozen water bottles can’t be hard to come by. You can start contrrolling fermentation temps on the very next batch.
I tried the swamp cooler technique before I got a fermentation-dedicated chest freezer and found it to be a major PITA. That being said, I found the quality of my beers increase 100-fold as soon as I was able to manage fermentation temperatures. This was the single biggest improvement in my beer, bigger than yeast starters, or wort aeration, or even switching to all-grain.
And I have only had one big messy fermentation since - it was after I had transferred a big double red ale to secondary for dry hopping. I thought the beer was finished (in three weeks it had dropped from 1.070 to 1.018). Sure enough, the next morning, I found the breathable silicone bung on the floor of the closet I had moved the better bottle into, and the beer hd begun an active secondary fermentation. I cleaned and sanitized the bung, then put it back on - the beer had no signs of oxidation or other problems… I think the initial fermentation stall was due to a lack of wort aeration (I pitched a liter of brewpub-fresh WLP001), and I have since purchased a wine degasser to drill-aerate wort with.
I use the guest bath tub. Filled to the point of overflowing into the drain, with the carboys sat in it. I have an hi/low indoor/outdoor thermometer with the probe sitting in the water. I can dump ice from the ice-make into it in the morning, or put in a frozen bottle and keep temps at 65F, even when the house is 80 during the day. The advantage of the water bath over a cooled airspace is the heat capacity of the water is more likely to keep the beer within a degree or two of the bath.
Really? I used to use it often during the summer in my basement when my fermentation fridge was full. I found it pretty easy, that said the temps were already in high 60s. Never tried to in warmer temps.
