turkey

Recipes 

I started out with a Heifeweizen brew and was instructed by my brew supplier to hook up a blow off tube. I went ahead and did this and the brew decided to explode while I was away at work. I don't know how long it was sitting out in the open, but I dumped the whole batch. I'm totally bummed now

My next brew isn't going to be a foamy one until I get more experience. Can someone please give me advice on how to fend off explosions? I don't want this to happen again. Quite a mess it made

Thalon

Recipes 

What type of vessel did you use for a fermenter? Was it a plastic bucket with a tube hooked up to the same hole you attach the airlock, or was it a glass carboy with a 1" ID tube fitted to the entirety of the mouth? I would always recommend the carboy + 1" tube for beers you know will ferment vigorously. The plastic bucket lids have too small a hole. What happens is the smaller tube gets clogged which builds up the pressure inside until it blows. I have *never* seen the 1" tube get clogged that bad.

Three_Trees

Recipes 

When you say explode, do you mean the entire bucket/carboy broke apart, or just the top? Because you did say you ended up dumping it, so do you mean just the top blew off? In that case, it would have been fine to be exposed to the open for a bit.

Yooper

Recipes 

Never, ever dump a batch until it's been completely done for a while and tried. We always suggest posting here first because we can often tell you how to save it.

There was probably not a thing wrong with the beer you dumped. If you had it in a 7.5 gallon bucket, you could have just sanitized the lid and stuck it back on with the blow off tube. Same with the carboy. I'm guessing either your carboy was too small for the fermentation for your tubing clogged up.
Either way, most of the time the beer is fine unless you actually have critters swimming in it.

__________________
Broken Leg Brewery
Giving beer a leg to stand on since 2006

libs

Recipes 

Second to Yooper. The foam and CO2 that is being produced will give you some protection. If you have a vigerous enough fermentation to blow the top or hose or whatever got blown off, there should be that much more protection.


PS nice new avitar Yoop!

__________________
Libs

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Benjamin Franklin

Drinking: Apfelwine
Bottle conditioning:
Secondary: Double Chocolate Stout
Primary #1: AHS imperial Amber
Primary #2:
planning: always more apfelwine, time to get some summer beer going!

Philip1993

Recipes 

I'll third that Yooper post. Never dump a beer based on the possibility that it'll be bad...

__________________
OdorDestroyer.com - Pet odor removers and related products.

david_42

Recipes 

I've had multiple blowups and none of them went weird. Clean the lid & if the foam is still up to the top of the bucket, slide the lid across the top, cutting the foam off.

Next time you have a big problem, post first. Someone on the forum has seen it before.

__________________
Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!"

Radarbrew

Recipes 

I've seen a lot of posts where the folks say there hole in the bucket lid is too small for a blowoff tube. I thought all those lids had about a 1' hole where you could easily adapt some pvc and a couple elbows to it where it drains into a water filled bucket to bubble. When I don't use that, it's a rubber stopper with a hole big enough for the regular airlock. Just saying.....

__________________
No, I like snow, it's the shoveling it I could do without....

WOP31

Recipes 

Ihad a Beer up in my attic for a couple of days and at some point hte carboy cap blew off an it sat up there, while i was out of town for 4 days and nothing happend to it, basically i am saying the same thing as everyone else, you shouldn't dump a batch until you are sure that it is bad, and the only way to tell that is to let it finish out.

Anyway don't get discouraged, just go out and start your next batch.

Cheers

__________________
"Yes, I am a pirate two hundred years too late. The cannons don't thunder there's nothin' to plunder,
I'm an [under] forty victim of fate, Arriving too late, arriving too late."
-Jimmy Buffet

turkey

Recipes 

I have the plastic bucket with the standard hole. It was plugged with the rubber stopper and the stopper's smaller hole was plugged with the airlock. the blow off tube was then attached to the airlock.


Sure, I could have posted about what to do but it was 2:30am when I got back from work. Some one please spell it out for me because I'm very confused. How do I avoid blow off with a plastic bucket? Right now I don't feel like investing in another glass carboy after buying this brand new kit and not having brewed a single batch.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I'm tired