Fermentation Question.

Hello everyone. I have a fermentation situation that I have never encountered and could use some input. I brewed my first all grain batch Sunday afternoon and put my fermenter in the closet at about 5:00 PM on Sunday evening. All seemed to be going just fine until I awoke this morning to find that yeast had over run my air lock and spilled out of the fermenter and onto the floor. Any thoughts?

Don't use an airlock in your primary. Use a sanitized cork and a tube running into a water filled,larger bottle that is sitting in a tray itself. A vigorous ferment will usually overwhelm an airlock. Airlocks are fine for secondaries or when the ferment is really slow.

Hi and welcome! Sorry about your floor. A temporary fix is to put your fermenter inside a rubbermaid tub or something like that.

I hook up a blow off tube for most of my beers. Mine is a stopper with a small piece of hard plastic tube that I cut off from a racking cane sticking out of it. I hook tubing to the piece of racking cane and run it to a gallon jar 1/3 filled with water. The CO2 bubbles out through the water, just like through an airlock, and if the krausen overflows, it goes through the tube and into the jar.

Thanks for the advice. More importantly thanks for helping me to see that I am not looking at a problem here. I would hate to have to toss all that beer.

Can you over ferment a beer?

Definitely no need to toss it. I had a hefe clog the airlock and blow the lid off the bucket. Yeast was all over my closet... I sanitized everything, put it back together and the beer turned out great.

zedman9 said:

Can you over ferment a beer?

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You can't really over ferment a beer. The yeast will eat the available sugars and then start cleaning up. You can leave it sitting on the trub for too long.