HELP...i keep losing beer

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Surfman

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so i brewed a batch of barley wine yesterday, og 1.091, and pitched a 1 quart starter of whitbread yeast. the thing is just going nuts!! my problem is that i have lost nearly 3/4 of a gallon of beer already though the blowoff tube. is there anyway to prevent this or is it just a hazard of brewing big beers. by the way it is in a 6.5 gal carboy.

thanks
 
Same thing happened to me with my RIS-888.

I guess you just have to scale the recipes up a bit to allow for blow-off.

I wouldn't do as some suggest and re-top the carboy to get up to volume.

Better to be a pint or two short and a perfect beer.
 
I just sarted using it this weekend so I don't have a lot of experience to go on, but Foam Control (Fermcap-s) did wonders in my boil kettle this weekend. It's supposed to be just as affective in the fermenter. See the current thread "Let's Talk Foam Control'.
 
How high is the 6.5 carboy filled?
I've barely ever had blowoff problems with my beers because I fill a 6.5 gallon fermenter to 5-5.5. And I'm still getting the attentuation and final gravity I'm aiming for with a majority of my beers.
 
i fill my carboys to 5.5-6 gallons and i've never had enough blow-off for it to lose any significant amount. of course, it's been a while since i've done a brew that big!
:drunk:
 
DeathBrewer said:
i fill my carboys to 5.5-6 gallons and i've never had enough blow-off for it to lose any significant amount. of course, it's been a while since i've done a brew that big!
:drunk:

Hmm, deathbrewer, i think you need to go big, to live up to the user name!
 
SRFeldman79 said:
How high is the 6.5 carboy filled?
I've barely ever had blowoff problems with my beers because I fill a 6.5 gallon fermenter to 5-5.5. And I'm still getting the attentuation and final gravity I'm aiming for with a majority of my beers.

it was filled to just above the 5 gal mark.
 
i had a similar issue with my first batch of red ale. only bottled out to 1.5 cases. i use 5 gal carboys.
i made an ipa on sunday and threw a pound of honey in for the hell of it. blow off was crazy! twice as much krausen twice as long as the red ale. its airlocked now that the foaming has stopped but its still bubbling like crazy! friggin awesome man!
i checked on it this morning before coming to work and noticed that i had a decrease in volume as well. how much i cant accurately say, but i just wrote it off that the extra honey that i added to the malt is being eaten up by the yeast and i should expect a drop. this assumption is correct isnt it? because if gas is being created it has to come from somewhere -the whole matter cannot be created nor destroyed thinking . . .

with the 5gal carboy theres no room for overfill, so there really is no way around it for me. but i guess this is why they make 6.5gal carboys huh?
 
just another followup: last night i made two 5gal batches in 5gal carboys. a canadian ale and a nut brown ale. by this morning they had blown off like crazy. this time my carboys have markings on them and ive lost almost a whole gallon in each. i figure at the rate its going it will be a gallon by the time i get home from work.
the only thing i did differently this time was that instead of throwing the yeast into the carboy i set it in water so it was liquid.
 
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