Only 2 reasons to ever look at your airlock

Pappers_ said:

Add me to the list of brewers who do look to airlock (or blowoff tube) activity as a sign of active fermentation.

Click to expand...

Add me, too.

No airlock activity in the hours/days after pitching is indicative of one of several things:
Ineffective fermenter seal (likely no big deal - but a cause nonetheless)
Long lag time
No active yeast

Couple that information with a visual inspection and/or hydrometer reading, and the lack of activity tells you something - either the fermenter is poorly sealed, or the yeast hasn't started working very hard yet (maybe never will). Is it cause for worry? Probably not. Does it provide information? YES! If nothing else, it is an indicator that you might take a hydrometer reading much sooner than you would otherwise.

On the other hand, a very active airlock is indicative of healthy fermentation. It's reassuring. It also provides information. It's not complete information, but it is indeed information.

A slowly bubbling airlock is less useful but not useless. As mentioned previously, atmospheric changes can cause that just as easily as fermentation. However, if the airlock was bubbling rapidly for a period of time, and activity slows/stops, it indicates that fermentation may be coming to a halt. For beers that I want to keg quickly, I use that as an indicator to take a reading. A hydrometer is your friend.

I'm not advocating using airlock activity as the sole means by which you measure the health of your yeast. However, there is information to be gleaned by watching it.

I use slowing airlock activity and dropping ferm temp to tell me when to start ramping the temp up on my lagers. I use airlock activity to my advantage based on experience with what it indicates.

It's a useful tool in my brewing toolbox. Learn what it means in regard to your system and it can be useful to you too.

Yes, it can tell you a lot of things, I agree. So watch away if you'd like. But look at your first batch and see no bubbles and think, oh, fermentation is done! Just don't do that and we can all get along just fine. :cross:

I haven't brewed a lot of batches to this point. Still under 20, and probably opening myself up to huge ridicule, but if you see no airlock activity, do people really just go ahead and let it ride for 2 or 3 weeks? Maybe it's just been dumb luck, but all of my brews have bubbled through the airlock. I ferment in buckets, so I can't tell by quick glance weather or not anything else is going on, but if by day 4, I haven't seen any airlock activity, I would at least give the beer itself a look to make sure something was going on.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea behind "Airlock is not an indicator" but, I still feel it a bit of a disservice to tell people never to worry about airlock activity. If you don't see anything, ever, I would say it's time to check something, maybe your lid isn't shut, bad yeast, etc. But I would rather just check on Day 4 and either be at east or fix the problem, than wait two weeks to find out that something unwanted was growing in my beer because my yeast never took off.

Yes, Hydrometer reading should always be the end all be all of weather a beer is done, but to say no activity ever, is always OK, seems wrong to this novice. I think a better way to say it would be, don't let bubbles be an indicator that fermentation has stopped. Like I said, this is only because I have yet to have a situation wher I didn't get bubbles in teh airlock. And with the amount of CO2 being produced, it would seem odd to me that you would never see a bubble, unless something was amiss.

No not any ridicule from me. When I first started I would watch the fermenter like a worried mom watches her kids. Now I just toss it into a cool dark place and leave it alone until racking or bottling time. Well that is not 100% true. Everytime I see a infection thread that is a infection I will go and glance at it

I guess I was just assuming that everyone saw it/heard it bubbling in the first week, at varied amounts, reaching it's most active stage at various points in the game. So sorry again about any confusion. My airlocks always stop visibly bubbling(both glass and plastic), long before the beer has finished fermenting, that's all I was trying to say. Maybe if I watched them long enough while still fermenting, I would see a bubble.

Everyone has different methods. I know that. Mine is to brew it up, pitch the yeast, then set and forget. Since they are in the same room as my computer though, I'll always hear the newest one bubbling away at some point soon after I've gotten it started. If I don't hear it, check the seal, make sure something hasn't blown off. But that's just the first week. If I heard nothing and seal was good, yes, of course, something is wrong, yeast was bad, something happened.

3) To make sure, after a few days, it is indeed bubbling.

And that's just if you use my set and forget method. Personally, I would use a beer thief after 2 weeks to check fermentation by taste over what the airlock is doing, but that's just me.

Until I bring up a subject, I don't realize how much other methods differ from mine. If nothing else, I learned something. And I hope others do not think this was a waste of a topic, because read through and surely, you will learn something. Either from my OP, or something else you read here(probably the most likely scenario).