6am Burton Union Build!!!

I brewed chemnitz's Vespers Abbey Dubbel on Friday and came home yesterday from hiking to find a clogged blowoff tube and thankfully a blown seal on the bucket lid rather than a full on krausen explosion. I cleaned up the mess and let it go. But it keeps blowing krausen through the blowoff at a steady pace. I have read that a massive blowoff will carry proteins and such that are vital to head retention and body but mild to moderate blowoff actually carries away the nasty bitter layer that develops first (braun hefe) as well as trub and hops residue. I began to wonder how much volume I had lost and when I cleaned up the mess I was tempted to top crop some yeast but decided I just needed to get the lid back on and leave well enough alone.

My allergies kept me up most of the night with sinus pressure and runny nose so I kept checking my latest brew when I got up to blow the nose or get a drink. Still steady blowoff. As I sat there watching the CO2 bubbles and foam spit out of the tube I saw a mason jar with a plastic lid sitting on the shelf next to my fermentation fridge. I remembered that I had a pack of misc. grommets leftover from installing the temperature probe from my Johnson controller through the side wall of the fridge. I had an extra airlock that was just laying in a box doing nothing. So at 6 a.m. I pulled out the drill, found the grommets, went out onto the porch so I would not wake my lovely sleeping wife (she would KNOW I had lost my **** if she saw this ), and I made this simple but effective Burton Union type thing that will allow me to simultaneously top crop yeast, empirically measure the amount of material I was losing, and keep it all sanitary at the same time :rockin:

This took me less time to build than to dig out the stuff to build it with!!!

Nice job!

This one below has always looked like a design I would like to emulate.

That's pretty slick! Nice way to get the yeast w/o losing any precious beer

Looks like I should have done this yesterday when I got home though...either there's not much blowoff happening now or I have CO2 leakage at some point in the set up. Not likely though as it was bubbling like mad when I installed it!

Not done, just slowed a bit! I have a nice layer of yeast on the bottom that keeps gettin a little bigger each time I check.

I think I will use this yeast to conduct fermentation tests on my homemade Belgian candi syrup with a table sugar control to see how fermentable it after going through the Maillard reactions needed to create it