Blow-off tube ?

How soon do I need to get a blow-off tube in lol brewed yesterday 3rd batch woke up and kruesen is everywhere it was crazy had to get to work so I'm headin home at lunch to put a tube in and take airlock out this shouldnt b a problem? Any ideas

i would think its fine. this happend to me recently. didn't know it was happening and got home after work and put on the blow off tube. just sanitize your hands and some paper towels to wipe up with.

Many on HBT...including me...ALWAYS use a blowoff tube for the first 48-72 hours of fermentation. Depending on exactly what you are brewing, I'd much rather be safe than sorry! And I'm fermenting in a 6-gallon Better Bottle, so I have adequate "head-space" yet I still get some krausen in the water that the tube is stuck in.

glenn514

I have just gone to using a blow off tube on every brew at least until things slow down. My wife is very supportive of my brewing but if I blew beer all over the ceiling I am afraid that she may not support it as much.

A blow off tube is very good (and cheap) insurance.

If I didn't have a blow-off tube on my porter, it would have made one of the largest messes on homebrew record. haha. For the first 24-36 hours I had krausen constantly coming out the blow-off tube. So its definitely my insurance as well. I put it on right as im getting ready to leave the carboy alone for the fermenting.

What about using a piece of snatched foil for the first day or two? I've read about this and thinking it may be just as good as the blowoff tube.

My first batch I just had a 3 piece air lock on my primary. I didnt understand what everyone was talking about with the need for a blow off tube. My 2nd batch I forgot to pick up a 2nd air lock, since my only one was being used on my carboy for the 1st batch.

So I made myself a blow off tube until I could make it to the store the next day. I had a good 6-8" of clearance in my primary and on the 2nd day I found out why blow off tubes are important.

I will from now on use a blow off tube for my primary!

Thnx for the info guys def using blow off from now on I guess it's just a step in this home brew world! I was more worried about contamination. I'll post sum pics at lunch time

mux11 said:

What about using a piece of snatched foil for the first day or two? I've read about this and thinking it may be just as good as the blowoff tube.

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the blowoff tube lets all the krausen and gunk come out of the fermenter and into the blowoff bucket. some of the fermentations would be able to come up and out of the fermenter, and you would get a mess all over carboy and floor. tin foil wouldn't work to contain the mess like a blowoff tube will

From now on, I will use a blow off tube every time for the first few days. On my last batch, I finished brewing around 6pm and then at 7am I woke up to the smell of sweet beer all over the lid of my bucket...of course my transfer tubing didn't fit on the airlock and the hardware store was closed since it was Sunday! I'm just glad I woke up in time to clean up or my gf would have been super pissed, lol.

hmmm you guys got me nervous I just brewed last night and I am using a 61/2 gallon carboy and a 3piece airlock. Should I throw a blow off tube on there? and how do you attach ? just put tube directly in? I tried thos on another carboy and it seems really loose I can actually see a tiny gap. is that ok? thanks for the input.

i just got a tube with the same outer diameter as the carboy opening's inner diameter( 1 1/4" i think. it fit in pretty snug.

rycov said:

i just got a tube with the same outer diameter as the carboy opening's inner diameter( 1 1/4" i think. it fit in pretty snug.

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Thats what I have 1-14 but it still isn't tight I also tried putting in some 1-1/2 and it was too big .I don't know what to do.

i don't know. i put mine on after it was going crazy so maybe the co2 coming out helped it seal?

Aschecte...

Take your three-piece airlock apart, and take the base portion...the part you stick in the hole of the stopper...to the hardware and find tubing that will fit over the hollow shaft in the center. Buy 5-6 feet of it, stick the tubing onto the hollow shaft and into a bottle/bucket with water. You are set to go!

glenn514

glenn514 said:

Aschecte...

Take your three-piece airlock apart, and take the base portion...the part you stick in the hole of the stopper...to the hardware and find tubing that will fit over the hollow shaft in the center. Buy 5-6 feet of it, stick the tubing onto the hollow shaft and into a bottle/bucket with water. You are set to go!

glenn514

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Another option -

take a piece of racking cane, insert into your bung/stopper, attach the hose to the piece of racking cane

fyi, this is a batch of cider, so doesn't need much headroom

All is much better now and bubbling slowed down a bunch so I'll just put the airlock back on! Thnx for the help!!

my blowoff tube working

I'm pondering making a blow off tube for my next batch but I'm not sure I need one. I brew AG stovetop, so my batches are smaller, 3.25 gallons into the fermenter, which is a 6 gallon carboy. I'm assuming I've got enough empty space in the fermenter where I won't need a blowoff tube, but this is also my highest gravity brew so far, with an est. OG of 1.073. Thoughts/experience on something like this??

schia said:

my blowoff tube working

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y0rNDcwfBw

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Brilliant!!!!!!!!

How big of tubing would you need to fit the hole that the blow off valve goes in? I use the buckets from the brewers best kit.

smithnick0...

I don't happen to know the outside diameter...someone on this board probably does...but you could take the bucket lid to the hardware and try hose sizes until you find the correct one. Then, buy about 5 feet of it.

glenn514

Just to save from adding a thread I'd like to add a valve to my kettle but I'm wondering about cooled wort going through the valve if it would b sterilized enough? Any thoughts?
On that note my head got to thinking and thought If I would flow my hot wort through the valve and though a internally sterilized wort chiller sitting in an ice bath and straight into my primarary.....? Any thoughts on that?

sils13 said:

Just to save from adding a thread I'd like to add a valve to my kettle but I'm wondering about cooled wort going through the valve if it would b sterilized enough? Any thoughts?
On that note my head got to thinking and thought If I would flow my hot wort through the valve and though a internally sterilized wort chiller sitting in an ice bath and straight into my primarary.....? Any thoughts on that?

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As long as you clean your valve out the heat from the boil should kill off any bad guys that may be lurking in there, I have yet to have any issues with my kettle's valve.

The idea of hot wort flowing into a "wort chiller" is basically a counter flow wort chiller. Look it up!

I always use a blow-off tube until I rack to the secondary. I picked this one up years ago at a Brew & Grow store since out of business and haven't seen another since, hope I never break the glass tube because it's real easy to clean compared to a rubber hose

I don't use blow-off tubes, nor do I secondary... I'm lazy. I'm sure I'll get in trouble one of these times but I'm willing to chance it.

@Homebrew101... yummy looking collection you have going there.

ThePearsonFam said:

I don't use blow-off tubes, nor do I secondary... I'm lazy. I'm sure I'll get in trouble one of these times but I'm willing to chance it.

@Homebrew101... yummy looking collection you have going there.

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i never used blow off tubes either untill this last batch, small mess, nothing dramatic. but i'll probably learn my lesson here before something bigger happens.

Instead of a bucket, I made a couple of Burton Unions of sorts, without the recirculation, which you could do it you wanted to.

I bought two of the snap lockable food keeper boxes at target. They are about 5" x 5" x6" tall with snap locks on all four sides of the lid. I drilled two holes in the lid, one for connection of the blow off hose, a threaded tubing barb from the hardware store will do, and another for an air lock. I put a barb in a stopper for the carboy. The tubing size should be on the larger side, 1/4 in inner diameter or larger. Now, sanitize the inside of the box and put in a bit of distilled water or spring water. The barm that blows off is viable yeast. If you brew frequently, you now have a fresh yeast culture free of dead yeast and trub that you can use, plus you won't be cleaning up any more messes. Using one of these is great especially with bigger beers where blow offs are a must. Alternatively, you could fore go the distilled water, and simply poor the beer that falls out of the barm back into the fermenter to ferment out. Saving beer and preventing excess head space in fermenting kegs was the reason the Burton Union system was invented in the first place. With this little system, the carboy and box are both filled with CO2 and the overflow liquid can be added back and or some of it saved for yeast culture.

To keep good sanitation, the end of the blowoff tube should be in a bucket or bowl with Star San water. That way when fermentation subsides, there's no bacteria buildup on the old krausen inside the tube that could make its way into your beer.

Used my first blow off tube on my latest Pale Ale. I've brewed around 10 batches so far and even though some use one every time, I just never had to. I ferment in 6.5 gal buckets with my batches ranging from 5 to 5.5 gal, so its never really a problem.

However, last night I noticed my airlock bubbling like crazy, so I figured I should play it safe. All night long the blow off tube was releasing a constant stream of bubbles, couldn't even count them they were coming out so fast. No krausen has come through yet but this thing is putting off a lot of gas, not sure why its especially vigorous.

I brewed a big ol' RIS and knew the blow off tube was an absolute must. and boy was it ever! the problem was that it ended up acting as a siphon, transferring about half my batch (yeast, of course, included) into the bucket. sh*t! fermentation stalled, pitch was off now, and i had only about 2gal of brew left in my carboy. argh! huge loss.

next time, i will be sure to elevate the bucket and, thus, the output end of my hose to above the beer line. this will ensure that all the CO2 gets out and all the good stuff stays in.

Wait a second. It siphoned half your batch into the blowoff receptacle? I'll remember to pay attention next time I fix a blowoff tube, I've never had this problem in all my long weeks of homebrewing.

Elevating could cause the opposite problem and suck whatever is in the receptacle into your beer! Cat hair, dust, and any other stuff that weird homebrewers have floating around their house. As long as everything's stationary and you don't cause suction you can avoid this, but I consider loss from the carboy the lesser of two evils since you can lose a whole batch to the little monsters in your blowoff water.

good point on the backfire possibility, and, yes, half the batch. the catch water was black and the yeast cake at the bottom was as large as the one in the carboy. it as crazy.

i read about the elevation of the bucket on some forum somewhere... or was it in a book? anyway, perhaps above the beerline is a bit extreme, but certainly notable elevation seems prudent. i'm thinking that the transfer of catch water into the carboy is pretty close to impossible anyway. i mean, there's always going to be some head pressure coming from the fermenter to the blow off bucket. plus, that's a big hose landing into not much H2O. with such little volume in the blow bucket and that big I.D. hose, getting a siphon going in the opposite direction would take some serious suction.

i dunno, of course. all i want is to avoid what happened to my black gold again!

Keep the blowoff bucket LOWER than the carboy and make sure the carboy end of the tube does NOT touch the beer level (in only need be inserted into the carboy just enough to not fall out). It is not possible to get a siphon going in either direction as long as you ensure those two simple things.

thanks @malintent. when the aforementioned happened to me the two vessels were on the same level. the hose was inserted properly. i was definitely surprised at what happened which is why i went looking for answers. when i found the info saying to place the blowoff bucket HIGHER it made sense. thinking about it a littler more since i've been hanging around this thread, i believe the main takeaway was that there needs to be a good bit of vertical tube coming out of the carboy so the krausen can bubble up all it wants, but everything will fall back into the brew.

pls explain why you say to put the bucket LOWER. i can't figure out why that would be necessary/helpful. thx.

If your tube is 6 inches above your beer,how is a siphon possible?

point taken. i suppose siphon isn't the right word choice. perhaps 'channel' or 'medium' might work? all i know is that at high krausen, that beer was going ka-razy. OG measured out at 1.120 and i had a huge pitch. i could see the foam moving densely through the hose and there was a thick head in the blowoff bucket. i let it be, though, and it wasn't until fermentation died that i inspected more closely and found the loss.

I still can't understand how you lost that much to blow off. I damn sure can't think of a way to stop it.

Maybe a lower temp would help. You know, mellow the fermentation a little bit.

lawdog said:

thanks @malintent. when the aforementioned happened to me the two vessels were on the same level. the hose was inserted properly. i was definitely surprised at what happened which is why i went looking for answers. when i found the info saying to place the blowoff bucket HIGHER it made sense. thinking about it a littler more since i've been hanging around this thread, i believe the main takeaway was that there needs to be a good bit of vertical tube coming out of the carboy so the krausen can bubble up all it wants, but everything will fall back into the brew.

pls explain why you say to put the bucket LOWER. i can't figure out why that would be necessary/helpful. thx.

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No problem. It is all a matter of where the tube is submerged in liquid. If the tube is under the liquid line in both the bucket and the fermentor, then a siphon is possible in either direction if they are on the same level. If the blow off bucket is higher, then it could siphon back to the beer... if the beer is higher, then that is when the beer can siphon out to the bucket... but again, that is only if the tube is under liquid on both ends.

The blowoff tube should not be under liquid in the fermentor, but you cannot really control if it will go under the liquid level in the blowoff bucket (it will fill up and eventually cover the tube no matter what. So, with the tube in liquid on one side (the bucket) and in air (and foam) on the other side, it is the liquid side that needs to be lower.

Does that explain it at all?