First try at brewing - Venting.

**edit**
How did I miss the sticky? I literally missed it until I hit POST. Anyway, I'll let it go an relax. I oxygenated by vigorously aerating with a wire whisk until there was like 2 inches of foam. I hope that was enough.

Well I bought all my stuff to be a big boy brewer finally. Decided to go with the Ferocious IPA from Midwest. Cooked it all up yesterday, went pretty well all things considered. Wyeast liquid, packet completely swollen. Never took a gravity reading, mainly because it's an extract kit. Took me a while to get it down to 70 degrees, maybe an hour or so. Pitched at 4:00pm yesterday, 68 degrees outside temp reading on my temp strip. How long before I get no bubbles should I be worried? Tonight maybe? I peeked under the lid, and there's not even any krausen forming at all.

Another note, when you go from kettle to primary, are you filtering at that point to get the junk from the bottom out, or just dumping it all and filtering later?

Thanks. I came home tonight and it's bubbling just fine. It got much warmer than anticipated here in NE Ohio, so it was showing 74 when I got in...oops! I put it in a large water vessel, with some ice and got it down to 68.

I rack from my pot to my fermenter, but whatever path you choose most of anything that gets into your fermemter will settle out with the yeast and be left behind when you rack to your bottling bucket.

Is there any trick to getting the most product out when you get to the bottom layer? Or once you get close to the sediment layer do you just call it a day? I use the auto-siphon and will be racking right to a keg from primary. Maybe craft some sort of screen to cover the bottom end of the siphon sitting in the primary?

you could wedge something under your primary during fermentation so that the trub builds up more at the lower end of the incline, then, when you go to rack, you can put the tip of the syphon at the upper end of the incline where there's no, or very little, yeast cake. To get the last little drop you could switch the wedge to the opposite side and continue syphoning because, if you've allowed enough time for primary, the yeast cake should have compacted and become relatively solid.

Ogri said:

you could wedge something under your primary during fermentation so that the trub builds up more at the lower end of the incline, then, when you go to rack, you can put the tip of the syphon at the upper end of the incline where there's no, or very little, yeast cake. To get the last little drop you could switch the wedge to the opposite side and continue syphoning because, if you've allowed enough time for primary, the yeast cake should have compacted and become relatively solid.

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This, but dont feel like you need to get every last drop out, or that the world is going to end if you get a bit of yeast. If your going into a secondary, it will settle out, if your bottling, let it sit for 30 mins to an hour and most if it should settle out to the bottom again.

jrodder said:

Well I bought all my stuff to be a big boy brewer finally. Decided to go with the Ferocious IPA from Midwest.

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This was my second batch and is dryhopping right now and will be bottled this weekend. The gravity samples I took tasted pretty great for flat beer so I can't wait to see how the finished product ends up.

Yeah tasted good to me too, I have a few more days till dry hopping though. I think batch #2 will be a Christmas Ale, and then possibly a shot at the Creme Brulee Stout from Southern Tier. I have a feeling I am only going to do a few more extract brews before I move on to AG, but that depends on the budget.