first batch in the fermentor

well, my first kit, a honey porter from midwest, is now in the fermentor. pitched early this morning. finished the boil late last night, but the temps took forever to come down. i'm at the point that i will need to get a chiller before my next batch. i overestimated the cooling potential of the snowbanks i packed around the kettle. but it came down, and it was in a closed sanitized container the whole time, so i think it should be fine. guess we'll see in a couple weeks how it is. i just hope it doesn't blow off the lid and make a mess in the basement, or the next batch will be a seriously tough sell to SWMBO. now i just have to get some more commercial brew, cause i'm out and its october thanks to all who have shared knowledge and encouragement here. never would've tried it without this place.

You could have spend 15 minutes constantly stirring the wort with a sanitized spatula and probably had it ice cold. The problem is that chilling the outside of the kettle chills the beer resting against the outside of the kettle, so you have really cool beer on the surface of the kettle, but the beer inside is still hot. Stirring forces the beer in the center to flow outward and rush against the freezing surface of the kettle. It's like if you spin a bottle of beer for a few mins in ice water it can become extremely cold, same principle.

Try that next time and no there is no problem keeping the lid off that long and stirring it like that. Just don't sneeze in it, drop clumps of snow in it, or let your hat fall in. Even that probably wouldn't do anything but still After you hit your temps, which won't take long at all give it one really vigorous whirlpool and put the lid on. Come back in 20 mins and you'll have a nice clear wort with a cone of sediment at the bottom you can easily siphon around and voila.

Snow Banks? Where are you? Land of the Mid Night Sun? Stirring the wort makes a big difference. I built my own chiller and it works great, but stirring the wort in the keggle really helps bring down the temp.

I use six gallon carboys for fermenting, and I use the 1 1/4" blow off tubes, no worries.

Welcome to the forum and keep on brewing.

yeah, i was stirring the hot wort too, just didn't seem to get it cooled down as much as i thought. and we've been getting snow almost daily the last week. i guess it started sunday, i was at an outdoor concert saturday night, and it held off that long. i'm in wyoming. we dont get much rain, if its coming down after mid-september, its probably gonna be white. at least it should be a good year for snowboarding. and brewing too i think.

ok so i have a question now. i did a starter, which sat doing absolutely nothing for about two days, then took off with visible bubbles, although not a lot of them. i had to put the starter in the fridge for about 48 hours while i was out of town, then i took it out at room temp about 10 hours before pitching. at what point should i pitch the dry yeast the kit came with and assume that the liquid yeast starter didn't make it?

My last (and first) batch took 5 days to have visible signs of fermentation in the airlock. I did not open the lid to check inside the pail though.

What is making you think the yeast might be dead?

mostly that the starter only showed signs of life very briefly, for a few hours there were bubbles, but that was on like the third day. then after that there was nothing, and then i put it into the fridge for two days. i guess they're tougher than i think, but i also would like to not have an infection take hold from me checking it because theres no significant yeast presence established yet. so i dunno if anything is going on or not but if i check say on the fifth day and theres nothing, i wonder if i should pitch the dry yeast so i dont have to keep opening the bucket to check and exposing my wort.

My Nottingham starter didn't do ANYTHING, but it was all I had so I pitched it anyway. 5 days later fermentation FINALLY seems to have started.

Revvy posted an interesting blog about evaluation before action ie...trusting the hydrometer. Don't do anything without getting a few readings a day or two apart to see if it is indeed fermenting.
http://blogs.homebrewtalk.com/Revvy/Think_evaluation_before_action/

Here is some advice I got from Corvax13:

Corvax13 said:

I would hold off on doing anything until after a few days (read: 5 or so), then take a gravity reading - chances are you have a leak somewhere and CO2 is escaping through there. Either that, or you have a very sneaky fermentation, either way, just wait it out.

Click to expand...

(Note that I am RELAYING advice not giving it as I am a noob!)

I too just finished my first batch. I'm a Mr. Beer guy, so I have the basics down, but this was quite a bit different.

It was an extract kit from NB - Dunkelweizen. I did it in my kitchen. I bought a big tub (capable of fitting kegs sideways) for sterilization, so put a few gallons of water in, a bit of Star San and then threw all my stuff in. I kept the tub in the middle of the kitchen so I could just toss stuff in and take stuff out as necessary.

My brew kettle is a 32oz aluminum pot from a turkey fryer kit. I was concerned about keeping a boil without the lid on, but I just wrapped a little aluminum foil around the base of the pot and it worked fine on the stove. Boiling for 60 minutes straight is a little weird for this noob - no long boiling required for the Mr. Beer kits.

I hydrated my dry yeast as per Mr. Palmer, and that seemed to work pretty well. For cooling, I used my brand new wort chiller and it worked like a champ. I think I got my wort from boiling to 75 degrees in 10-15 minutes. However, getting it down to 70 was tougher. I finally lost interest and pitched at about 72.

I'm not sure about the hydro reading I took just before pitching, but I'd say it was around 1.39. I guess this step isn't really necessary, since we just need to check that the readings stop changing after about 10 days, but I needed to practice.

My only goof was doing a final shake-up on my better bottle to aerate just before topping it off to 6 gallons. I didn't pay attention while filling and it foamed out the top pretty good. Hopefully I didn't lose too many yeasties.

All in all, a fun experience, and I'm looking forward to figuring out little tricks to make it go faster and easier.

DUH!! It only took me 24 hours to figure out I goofed.

On the drive home from work I was pondering how I could use my 5gal BB for another batch while my 6gal was fermenting. Then it occured to me that I was going to have difficulty transfering 6 gallons from my primary into my 5 gallon BB when I move it for secondary.

FINALLY it hit me. That extra space is supposed to be head space. I wasn't supposed to try to fill it all the way up. Good thing the foam stopped me before I completely filled it. There is still some decent head space, and the bubbler is going crazy today so everything seems to be working fine.

Oh well. So my beer will be a little watered down. I'll have to fill a few bottles before I rack the rest over to secondary, but at least I'll be getting some extra beer out of this mistake.