A lesson on using blow offs!!

So Bjornbrewer and I decided to make this 10g batch of Russian Imperial Stout. He's got a keggle, we both have 10g Rubbermaid Mash tuns. We decide to go ALL GRAIN on this thing by splitting the grain bill down the middle and each make a "5 gallon batch", then collect it all in the keggle.


Things went great. All was well when we split it up in the end and went our separate ways. I put my carboy in the fridge and stuck in the air lock just as with any other. I figured if it looked like I needed a blow off later, I would change it out. In the morning (Sunday), normal krausen. Whew. I didn't need one. Plus I had another beer to do Sunday, so I didn't have the room for the blowoff anyway. I was in the clear. Monday morning, still normal krausen, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then Tuesday morning came about. Ahhh... it's overflowing!! But I had to go to work. I left the air lock in and removed the cap and wrapped the carboy in a towel to catch the runoff. "I'll just take care of it when I get home" I says. This is what I found when I got home...


The delay in the fermentation activity caught me off guard!!



I learned my lesson.

Cheers.

Roman

man. that's not too bad, good thing the towel was there. It could of been a heck of a lot worse.

I love the sea anemone looking blob of goo there.

that always happens to me when i make hefeweizens with WLP300. now i just take off the airlock when i first notice the krausen start and leave the carboy open for a day or two

I had no idea that would come out like that. I just it was foamy krausen coming out of there. I didn't know it was all straight yeast!! That stuff was like dried peanut butter or something.

Nice! I brewed a RIS this weekend too. I got nervous yesterday and went home at lunch to rig up a blowoff. I'm glad I did, or I would have had the same situation!

Chock this up to being new, however I had the same thing happen to me really early in my brewing hobby. It was a stressful brew session and I wanted to throw out the wort. My wife told me to try it so it went into the primary and it did just what the picture shows, without the towel. I won't bore you with the details but the beer we made is very good, albeit strong. I consider it, dessert beer. End of the night beer. It will put you to bed with a smile on your face.

Well, I wouldn't say that I'm new to brewing. I've been brewing for 7 years. I had my first experience with a this a few years back when I did a pumpkin ale and was alerted when I heard a strange spraying noise from my back room. It was everywhere. I actually watched this one closely for nearly 3 days and all looked well. Then BAM. I'm sure this kind of thing has been seen before by many, but it surprised the hell out of me.

From now on, all my big beers get a blow off, no exceptions. Any one else have any pics of any crazy mishaps like this?

I don't have pics, but I had one look similar to yours. I didn't put a towel on it, but it was fairly easy to clean. Mine took about 12 hours to get like that, I'd be surprised too after 3 days.

I finally got a blowoff tube on mine. It had just started getting into the airlock...better safe than sorry! I should have snapped some pics of the last time this happened to me...made a big smelly mess.

Who is that sexy beast in the Jack Daniels shirt??? Oh, wait, that's me!

You guys made me so jealous! I have always brewed alone. I'd love to have somebody to drink beer with during the day, er, I mean brew with.

Thanks for the pictures!

Bjornbrewer said:

Who is that sexy beast in the Jack Daniels shirt??? Oh, wait, that's me!

Click to expand...

(Bjorn, you definitely look ok in the picture!!!!)

I did pretty much the same thing this past weekend. I started with the Bee Cave hefeweizen mash and loaded it into my 6-1/2 gal carboy with too much water. I pitched the yeast (wyeast something or other - can't remember off the top of my head) and on Monday it was coming up through the airlock so I popped in a blowoff hose. I had put the whole thing in a large tub of cold water to keep it cool through fermentation, so now there's quite a mess of crap in the tub. The krausen has fallen, so on went the airlock this morning.

I had this happen once before years ago, but I didn't have the smarts to change over to a blowoff tube. This was one time when RDWHAHB totally failed and I had green and brown **** all over the room. Just before the divorce.