First carboy spewing liquid - plugged airlock

Had my first carboy eruption today. It is on a 6.5g batch of Lord Rys chocolate mead. All I can say is DAMN!!!! I stood there for a good couple minutes with my jaw dropped just taking in the extent of the mess. No way I'll ever be able to clean it all up. Ceiling is permanently stained cocoa brown. Lost a lot of the cocoa powder too. Vanilla beans erupted.

I had just aerated about an hour prior, which I've never done before. I thought it was that, but it was actually the airlock become plugged with cocoa powder and then I imagine the pressure built and then pooooofffffff she let loose.

A good inch thick of sweet cocoa foam for a two foot radius around it. The ONLY saving grace is that I have a carpet steamer else I would never be able to clean that up. Everything else in the room is coated in brown droplets.

Awesome! Chocolate Geyser Mead, then?

I can just imagine what an unholy mess dry cocoa powder dumped on top of young fermenting beer must make. Even if it doesn't erupt.

Any particular reason why you didn't wait until primary fermentation was complete to give the cocoa powder thing a try?

Cheers!

I gave it a bachelor cleaning, which means 70% of the mess is cleaned up haha. The recipe calls for adding the cocoa right in primary. I started another batch a couple months ago and it is doing fine. I think the aeration caused a much larger krausen than I am used to, which then plugged the airlock with the powder and then well the rest is

Well on the bright side, the house smells amazing. It's like there's a 10 gallon pot of hot cocoa brewing of something.

I particularly like how it spray painted the nice outline of that box on your ceiling.

I count 15 things fermenting in that room. Dude!

My very berry beer blew out its airlock. The inside of my brew closet door still has purple splatter stains on it.

Haha yes the outline is pretty neat. I wiped off what I could from the ceiling but thing is well cocoa, that stains everything. I'd have to paint it white again to get rid of it.

I now know to really careful when fitting the airlock. If there is anything that could plug the airlock having a towel or something over it would at least limit the damage if it happens. Or I imagine a blow off tube. There are quite a few things brewing, the result of using 5 - 60 lb buckets of honey. Since meads need a lot of aging I was just trying to get a good stockpile going to enjoy years down the road.

Beautiful! A cutout of your ceiling should be hanging in an art gallery.

Oh good call, I wonder how much I could get for that section of ceiling on ebay?

I'm impressed all the way around.

porcupine73 said:

Oh good call, I wonder how much I could get for that section of ceiling on ebay?

Click to expand...

I don't know. Technically the yeast painted it, so you could say the artist is deceased. Might up the value.