Nice wiki update. It has a very good explanation of the process. I thin ksome more info about the actual pressures used and their impact would be good; it's the item that I have the most quesitons about.
Kaiser has mentioend that fermenting at 5psi was similar to the hydrostatic pressure experienced in larger breweries, so he didn't consider it to truly be under-pressure.
He also had that fun graph
One thing also to mention was in that last interview with Jamil and Palmer, they talked about how autolysis not happening in homebreweries might be due to the decreased pressure that the yeast at the bottom of the fermenter experience due to the size/shape of our fermenters. But leaving a fermented brew on the yeast for 1+ month under pressure might? dunno.
I have my batch in the corny going right now. I put ~6 feet of tubing between the quick disconnect and the spunding valve and coiled it up. That way I figure that if I do end up with blowoff, it won't make it to the valve, and I can quickly disconnect the tubing and flush it if need be.
I didn't aerate, but made a large starter from real wort (since i no chilled the batch), pitched at high krausen after letting it sit overnight and 5 hours later has it ramp up to 5+ psi, so it went pretty well. I have the valve set for 10 psi, and will jack it up after a couple of days I think.
On that valve, how many turns approximately per psi? Say, if I want to go up 5 psi from where I'm at, is that 1 turn, 5 turns, 10 turns?
I think that I'm going to dry hop by depressurizing after final pressure and diacetyl rest, putting the hops in, then cold crash for a week and then counter-pressure transfer. Although I might put the hops in another corny, purge it with CO2, then transfer that across. Then after a week, transfer again....that might be a bit better, and give me clearer beer in the end...
My main concerns at this point are 1) Clogging my dip tube since I didn't do a stellar job of removing the trub and 2) I wildly missed my mash-in temp (aka, may have denatured the enzymes), so the ferment might stop a bit early and I may need to push it further with some amylase enzyme to get it down to the desired FG.