Krausen, to remove or not. And, how?

I am brewing for the first time and the Krausen is building up. I have heard that it may be good to remove this from the fermenter. Is this true? And, if so, how would one go about getting it out of a glass carboy through that little hole?

Ummmm NOT!
Don't touch the damn beer!
Just chill, crack a beer and wait a couple of weeks, enjoy the show....
Krausen is your friend, that ugly foamy stuff is the side affect of your yeasties farting in your beer.
They are farting because they ate the sugar you put in there, they fart C02 and piss alcohol.... so it's all good, you want gas and you want alcohol so just let the slaves do their work and bottle it after about 2 weeks and you will be fine.....

Even the brown sludge on the top?

Yes, even the brown stuff on top. Step away from the beer.

It's so hard to just watch it! I want to do something! But OK.

While its fermenting, that nasty looking stuff on top is your yeast doing its job. When fermentation subsides, that stuff on top will fall out, leaving clean brew.
Noun - The foamy, rocky head of yeast that forms at the peak of fermentation.
all you really want to get rid of if you can is the hops after a boil, after the fermentation try not to disturb the yeast that has settled to the bottom. Good luck

i think i was reading in the joy of home brewing that the brown stuff contributes to the fusel alcohols when it drops back in the beer, but you're risking contamination too much if you try to get it out.

Leave it alone for 10 days to 2 weeks. You can then take a gravity reading just before bottling or keging if you like. There is no need to mess with it otherwise. There is no need for secondary fermenters either. Always be sanitary when handling beer and use a sanitizer on anything that touches the beer.

No serious fusels if you keep the temperature below about 22*c i think its about 70*f.
Just put down the scoop and back away from the beer...
Take up a hobby for a couple of weeks...

MikeRobrew said:

i think i was reading in the joy of home brewing that the brown stuff contributes to the fusel alcohols when it drops back in the beer, but you're risking contamination too much if you try to get it out.

Click to expand...

Charlie has since retracted this statement in light of current practice and new information. TCJOHB is rather dated in this respect.

MikeRobrew said:

i think i was reading in the joy of home brewing that the brown stuff contributes to the fusel alcohols when it drops back in the beer, but you're risking contamination too much if you try to get it out.

Click to expand...

Yeah well the Joy of Homebrewing was written over 20 years ago...it's a good resource for basic stuff, BUT a lot of the science of brewing has evolved.....it evolves every day...

When that book was written rinsing with bleach was thought to be the state of the art in sanitization...

Leave the krausen to fall and it will help scrub your beer clean especially if you leave your beer 3-4 weeks in primary...

Unless a book gets constantly updated it only represents the author's and the common knowlegebase at the time it was written which could be at the minimum 3, or even 10 or 20 years old. It's simply a snapshot, not a "holy text" unchangable (even Holy texts aren't unchangeable, btw) and far from perfect.

If the author doesn't revise it, or if he writes a sequel and no one reads it, then that doesn't mean that the NEW info doesn't exist or that the author still believes what he had originally written...

The thing with the internet and podcasts is that the author might have actually said he was wrong about something, or learned something new that renders what he originally wrote no longer valid, and it might have happened only yesterday...So the common wisdom has not caught up with it unless someone like me who tries to keep up with everything new and constantly tries to learn as much as he can reports it back to you...case in point...

Didja know that John Palmer has retracted most of what he wrote about IBU's in How To Brew?

He attended a high end academic conference on hops that totally blew away he felt what he wrote in the book....And he did an entire basic brewing podcast on it..