S-04 Went loco

So within 18 hours of pitching... i see this on the way out the door to go grocery shopping...


Thought i had enough time for when i got home to put a blow off tube in it...
So i get home, put the groceries away and start playing with the kiddo and completely forgot about it until i went to bed and said, i should go check on this. Look over toward the fridge and i see a pool of black under the fridge and some trailing off under the couch (thank god for hardwood floors at this point)



so i laugh, clean it all up and put some fermcap-S on it.

So turn to this morning, my wife walks into the bedroom and says "your beer exploded again" so i go out, and sure as ****, it blew up again.. didn't take any pics as it was 5a and i wasn't wanting to deal with it agian. but i put more fermcap-s in it, and swirled it so it'd mix up and all the foam had died off... so i'm crossing my fingers it's fine when i get home... and it's only at 68* right now.... awesome. haha.

Awesome!! And thank the beers gods for understanding swmbo's!!

well it helps that this is for her... haha, i asked her if she wanted a beer ever, and i had suggested a chocolate raspberry stout.

Not hating on you or anything but is there any reason not to blowoff everything? I know that you have to remember to change it out when you cold crash but any negatives with always using a blowoff?

I'm glad I'm not alone. I had an experimental batch of brown ale with S-04 in a Mr. Beer LBK that almost exploded when the vents clogged. I wound up having to just leave the cap off for a while as it gushed krauzen into the spare bathtub. I'm glad I checked on it before I went to work or I would have gotten one angry phone call from SWMBO. That's some happy yeast!

FlaglerBC said:

Not hating on you or anything but is there any reason not to blowoff everything? I know that you have to remember to change it out when you cold crash but any negatives with always using a blowoff?

Click to expand...

no negatives at all, I've just never had the need to use them. I've only had 3 beers blow out in my years of brewing and i usually catch them in time, i just didn't get a chance with this one

same thing happened to me Tuesday after getting home from work. I haven't used a blowoff tube yet but will from now on. Mine wasn't quite as bad as yours though. Checked it this morning and it's still just bubbling away, using WPL320 yeast.

Being a little new to homebrew (2 batches successful) this post has shown me some important things. Namely, when I moved up to carboy for primary from my plastic bucket, the 2 step air-lock wasn't enough to hold back the tide that is an immensely happy rush of S-04. I had my 3rd batch (BB Russian Imperial Stout) clog up the air-lock and pop the bung out of the top. I then proceeded to tell myself "dang, this beer is contaminated now, i'll have to just start over" and dumped it. RIP probably still good beer.

I am now going to go read up a lot more on blowoff tubing.

ah! don't toss it! wait for awhile! i've had 2-3 beers in the past do this and they all turn out fine open fermentation still makes great beer (albeit in a low dust area)

As long as it's still in initial fermentation,it'll be blowing enough co2 to keep it safe till you get home & deal with it. No reason to automatically dump it.