Slurry ferment - Cover Blastoff!

Well, I brewed my 1st batch where I dumped it right on top of the primary slurry of the previous batch last night. As mentioned in other threads its nice as you don't have to get your primary all sanitized and you have a huge pitch of yeast sitting on the bottom. Yep.

So this morning as the wife and I are starting to wake up we hear this "BOOM!". She asks "what was that?" Takes about 2 seconds for me to recognize what it is and another 1 sec to state: "Nothing dear, probably one of my buckets in the garage fell off the table. Why don't you get some more sleep?". She's a clean freak. Sure enough the top blasted off the plastic fermenter and I got foam/wort on the walls, ceiling, pictures etc. etc. I promptly get to cleaning up before she sees the major mess. By the time she finally does see what's going on I got it not looking quite so bad

Anyhow I can't locate the stopper so I figure its in the beer; I got another one but it's going so fast it can't keep up and is blowing foam. This is what you'd call a serious ferment



I have a bunch of sanitized paper towels sitting on the top to try and keep nasties out and soak up the foam. Since you can't really do a blow-off I guess you just let it run it's course and stop it up when you can eh?

That's exactly what my Russian Imperial was doing. I gave up, popped the top off, and set up some towels around the base of the fermenter. There was so much CO2 coming out, nothing else could get in. I left it like that overnight. By the morning, it had settled down enough to replace the lid and airlock....no problems at all.....stuff's powerful enough to stip paint and/or fuel your car though!

A friend of mine stated that when uses a previous batches yeast cake, he uses a blow off tube set up for the first 24 hours to avoid this.

I know my first time using a previous yeast cake started to bubble in the airlock in less than an hour. I was lucky as Im a night owl and brewed late around 3 in the morning, and was up in the morning around 9 to catch the airlock spewing away. If i had done it earlier, and allowed for a good night sleep, I would have had a big mess for sure!!!!

Is there a blowoff means you can setup on a plastic fermenter?

desertBrew said:

Is there a blowoff means you can setup on a plastic fermenter?

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What my friend did was use the "barrel" shaped air lock, remove the top, and the inner dome piece, and slipped a length of hose onto the inside piece, then ran the hose length down the side of the primary bucket and into a water/bleach solution in a bucket.

Oh yea, that would work. Cool

I guess my only concern with that would be the tip of the airlock being too small. Im not sure if he modified it or not, but I think I would trin some of the tip to open up the opening more to allow for a much easier and free flowing release of pressure. They are cheap enough to but so you could make one and dedicate it to blowing off.

2 words, y'all...bigger bucket.

Cheers!

Twas a 6.5 for a 5g. Thought that wasn't supposed to happen

huge foam musta been the order of the early morning...

i brewed up that 'barnyard best bitter' with my own twist( basically flaked rye instead of the flaked barley) on the grains last night and dumped the whitelabs irish ale yeast starter into it about 0230 this morning... i left for work about six hours later, but still no real activity...

stopped home for lunch and the foam had climbed it's way to the neck of my 6.5 gallon carboy, but had started to recede, but wooohoooo my whole beer room smells like sweet fermenting beer!!!!!

Same just happened to me. The IPA we brewed last night put on a huge foam. Just before I left for work this morning, I looked in at it and there was some beer in the airlock already. I guess later it totally gummed up the airlock, and blew the lid right off. When I got home, the lid was sitting on top of about 3" of foam.

I had no idea how long it had been like that, so I was afraid it might have committed suicide. So I pulled the airlock off, cleaned it real well, and replaced it and the lid. It just took off bubbling right along!

So hopefully the krautzen (sp?) has settled now, and the airlock will stay open. That crap makes a helluva mess!

BTW....the stuff already smells lovely.

Ah, messy but still a beautiful thing.

Getting less beautiful by the minute....just went back downstairs, and my airlock was filling with that yeast sludge again. It's been like 45 minutes since I replaced it!

So, I did like you....sanitized some paper towels and put them over the hole. I think I'm safe as long as there's pressure inside the bucket. I just wonder how long I should let it go like that?

Janx was right....that British Ale Wyeast is a rager!

i brewed up a cream ale yesterday and racked it diredtly onto the yeast cake from an oatmeal stout that I had in my primary. I had read all of these posts already so I kept a realy close eye on it. The airlock started bubbling after about 2 hours, so I put it out in the garage. When I woke up in the morning the airlock was all jammed up with sludge. I popped the top off of the airlock. That released a bunch of pressure. I hooked it up to a blow-off tube, and it is just bubbling away.

I hope that racking the cream ale onto the oatmeal stout doesn't ruin the color of the beer?

Sam75 said:

Janx was right....that British Ale Wyeast is a rager!

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You know what? I realized that I was using the "Dry English" one. They have English, Dry English, British, etc, etc. It gets confusing. It turns out I was mistakenly thinking I was using British, but I checked the vial and it was Dry English. I think I have used British before as well, but I can't recall the difference.

It's good to hear that it's also a rager. I quite like Dry English...more than regular English, which finishes a bit sweeter. Now I've gotta try the British again to see what the difference is.

Cheers!

The next time I ferment on the slurry I'm going to adapt my airlock with a blowoff like mentioned earlier in this thread. Cut some off the bottom to give enough flow. Will be intersting to see how (if) that works. Better than cleaning up the mess and listening to the wife rant & rave.

I posted this to another thread ,but thought I would add it here: I had the same thing happen to me last night. Yesterday I brewed a Nut Brown Ale. After reading a post by Janx on the method of using the yeast cake at the bottom of the primary fermenter from a previous batch, I decided to try it. I had just racked my IPA to secondary that morning, so I poured the finished Nut Brown Ale over the IPA's yeast cake (a White Labs Burton Ale yeast) that evening.

First of all, let me say this method rocks! If you are looking for a quick, vigorous fermentation, this is for you! Fermentation began within an hour and after three hours, it was so vigorous that I couldn't keep count of the bubbles in the airlock!

I woke up at 3am to find that the yeast and bubbles were beginning to spill out of the airlock! And this was a 5 gallon batch in a 6.5 gallon glass carboy! So, I hurriedly made a make shift blow-off tube and covered the whole carboy with a big, brown, unused paper lawn waste bag that I happened to have in the garage - just in case it does decide to spew like Moby Dick!

I've never had this happen, but I have to say I'm not worried. I think all will be fine. I'm hoping that when I get home tonight, the fermentation has calmed enough that I can go back to using the airlock.

I think I'm gonna need a bigger carboy!

Well Fella's,
Tomorrow night I will be racking my American "Lite" ale to the secondary, and I think I am just going to go ahead and pour the 5 gallons of apple cider (100% juice, no preservatives) onto the American Ale "Yeast Cake" in a 6.5 gallon glass carboy.... And given what I have seen here, I think I will go ahead and just attach the blow off tube right away...

I will let you know if it gets allllll crazy.
But hell, that's what, $6 i don't have to spend then???