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wilczewski

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New to homebrewing whipped up my first batch last night. Woke up this morning to find the airlock to be oozing foam on my 6.5 gallon glass carboy so it was a very active fermentation. Tried to clean the airlock when the carboy bung decided it had enough of the pressure popping off as if containing champagne. Needless to say a big mess. Tomorrow i try again. Heartbreaking to fudge up the first batch. Look forward to taking advantage of the info and experience on this site and hopefully someday i will be able to contribute.
 
Just sanitize the cap and airlock and put it back on, your beer should still be fine.
 
You should make a blow off hose and use it for the first few days of fermentation and you will be good to go.

Side note: I thought homebrew hell was Alabama.
 
From every mistake you learn more, and getting those tough brews out of the way first just ensures you good brewing karma for making some great potables down the line. Don't get discouraged! Everyone has been there. Check out the brewing mistakes thread, a little blow-off is nothing. :)
 
Please don't tell me you threw all of your beer out do to a blown airlock...
 
wilczewski said:
New to homebrewing whipped up my first batch last night. Woke up this morning to find the airlock to be oozing foam on my 6.5 gallon glass carboy so it was a very active fermentation. Tried to clean the airlock when the carboy bung decided it had enough of the pressure popping off as if containing champagne. Needless to say a big mess. Tomorrow i try again. Heartbreaking to fudge up the first batch. Look forward to taking advantage of the info and experience on this site and hopefully someday i will be able to contribute.
Click to expand...

This once happened to my dad, years and years ago. The carboy was sitting on the counter in the house, wrapped in a towel. Needless to say, the texture on the ceiling in that spot isn't all drywall :p
 
No still have some beer just not as much as i should have. Thanks for all the words of encouragement i need it after what i am now referring to as the incident.
 
Tonight i am going to whip up another batch though as i have some free time and the ingredients to do so. My other batch is in a glass carboy would using the food grade bucket result in any difference in flavor, should i buy another carboy? I just want to make sure i have an adequate amount of beer in about a month when i finish summer semester and have a little beer release party to celebrate my first batch.
 
The bucket will do fine. Whether you use buckets or carboys is all personal preference. I like carboys, having said that. It's good to see you're active in the brewing, there is nothing worse than running out of beer!
 
I used the glass carboy for my first and bucket for the second. I actually like the bucket except you can see it working. They should seriously make clear buckets that would be tits.
 
Heh.. I remember the first time I heard the stopper on a batch go POP!! and shot across the room. It scared the crap outa me, and I ran around like a damned fool looking for the right size tubing to setup a blowoff tube as I watched the carboy oozing krausen like a volcano oozing lava

Luckily you only make that mistake once :) (or twice...)
 
Glad to hear i'm not the only one who has experienced this, it was quite terrifying as i had just woke up and was still in zombie mode. The brewing process went well last night and i currently have an active fermentation on my hands. Can't wait to reap the benefit of my efforts.
 
yeah my first batch we didnt do a boil, and our effeciency was awful, so instead of a nice oatmeal stout we had something a little closer to brown water. you can usually catch the blowoffs an fix them, and it usually wont get contaminated with allt he co2 pushng everything out, but yeah forget a boil and you really cant go back an fix that.
 
What exactly do you mean when you say "didn't do a boil"? Are you talking about boiling your wort? Sorry if i didn't understand i'm still very new to the game.
 
One thing I thought I'd mention is that since summer is here, it's hard to keep the temperatures down once you get an active fermentation. The warmer the ambient temperature, the faster the fermentation goes. And since fermentation itself produces heat, a vigorous fermentation can get too hot very fast! Make sure you have it in the coolest place you can find and try to monitor the temperature (an aquarium stick-on thermometer is great!) and keep it under 70 degrees (beer temperature, not room temperature).

Also, make sure you don't put your yeast into the wort after brewing until the wort is cool enough. I like to cool my wort to 60-62 degrees, then add the yeast. Otherwise, it gets way too hot in the summer.
 
Thanks for the tips/advice/knowledge guys. The fermentation of the latest batch is going great but i think when the carboy exploded the other day it may have blown off a lot of the yeast because i have seen zero activity since the "incident". When i refer to the incident it wasn't just the airlock that blew, the bung/stopper of the carboy blew out like a cork which resulted in an unstoppable geyser of beer/wort that lasted about a minute wherein a large amount of the beer decided to spew from the container.
 
wilczewski said:
What exactly do you mean when you say "didn't do a boil"? Are you talking about boiling your wort? Sorry if i didn't understand i'm still very new to the game.
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Yep, first batch, all grain, and didn't really know what i was doing. but if i hadn't screwed up so bad on that, i wouldn't have been as pushed so hard to learn as much as i possibly can each go of the way. This site will help alot with that, if you just have the patience to look hard, you can learn an amazing amount just off of here.
 
While you should definitely boil, not doing so will not impact your efficiency. I suspect you had other issues. Boiling does concentrate the wort, but wouldn't be the difference between a successful batch and "brown water."
 
Yeah we brewed in a bag, with 2 different grain bags, and the mash was already completely inefficient. I mean, without any knowledge of the grain conversions and the enzymes at work back then, except if it gets too hot it kills the enzymes, i cant even try to think of the numbers we were hitting. i think the recipes OG was 1.055 and ours was 1.035. So yes alot more went wrong than just the boil. But i think that that was one of the more easily explained, and more obvious mistakes.
 
dude, my second batch i ever made was an extract IPA that ended up blowing off the airlock and ooozeed like crazy as well. I had been at work the all day when the airlock oozed, and when I finally got it all cleaned and organized, only 1.5 gallons of wort remained... still tasted good
 
So the wort has been fermenting 4 days now and i am seeing no more CO2 in the airlock how much longer should i allow it to ferment? I was under the impression that i should let fermentation run two weeks, is this incorrect?
 
I had that happen to a brown ale. WLP005(british ale yeast) with a large starter in a 5 gallon batch. I had serious activity in 3 hours. The next morning I woke up and the krausen was up to the stopper on my 6.5 gallon carboy and the temperature was in the mid 70's. I ran to get my swamp cooler and blowoff tube together but it was too late. The cealing got a nice brown paint job. From then on I learned to swamp it and use the blowoff tube from the moment it starts.
 
bknifefight said:
The bucket will do fine. Whether you use buckets or carboys is all personal preference. I like carboys, having said that. It's good to see you're active in the brewing, there is nothing worse than running out of beer!
Click to expand...

What he said ^^

I prefer buckets because they are much cheaper and a lot easier to clean and sanitize, not to mention, they are stackable, and when you don't have a lot of space, things that stack in each other are great (and I store my brewing stuff in my empty ones...when they are empty that is lol) :D

To the OP, don't get discouraged at all. I have been woken up from a dead sleep when I first started brewing, to the lid of one of my buckets bouncing off the ceiling, and Krausen ALLLLLL over the walls. It was a Belgian yeast (which are known to be very active and require a blow-off tube 90% of the time), and to this day I still brew that beer and love it. Keep on brewing and never get discouraged. If you have questions, don't ever be afraid to ask, this forum is great and there will always be someone who is willing to help. Couldn't have picked a better forum :rockin: PROST! :mug:
 
wilczewski said:
So the wort has been fermenting 4 days now and i am seeing no more CO2 in the airlock how much longer should i allow it to ferment? I was under the impression that i should let fermentation run two weeks, is this incorrect?
Click to expand...

The longer the better. You will rarely go wrong with leaving it longer. My rule of thumb is three to four weeks in the Primary, three weeks bottle conditioning. If I am adding fruit to a beer, I will do two weeks Primary and one week Secondary on a bed of the Fruit, but other than that I never use a Secondary. Also. just because the airlock isn't active, doesn't mean its not still fermenting :D
 
wilczewski said:
So the wort has been fermenting 4 days now and i am seeing no more CO2 in the airlock how much longer should i allow it to ferment? I was under the impression that i should let fermentation run two weeks, is this incorrect?
Click to expand...


Did you take a hydrometer reading for the OG ? At times, you will be unsure if the beer is fermenting or not. A healthy batch of yeast eats around 65 to 70 percent of available sugars ( often much more ). If you take a reading and notice that the hydrometer reading is not 35% or less of the OG, there is probably a lot of sugar still in the beer. There are several ways to make adjustments if that is the case....
 
I did take a an OG reading, i think i will give it at least two weeks and then take another reading. Thanks for the info guys.
 
As you see HBT is an excellent resource for brewing information. If you ever need help this is a great place to check out -before you make a decision.- Welcome.
 
wilczewski said:
So the wort has been fermenting 4 days now and i am seeing no more CO2 in the airlock how much longer should i allow it to ferment? I was under the impression that i should let fermentation run two weeks, is this incorrect?
Click to expand...

Fermentation will take as long as it needs to. You have no control over it. You can only monitor it's progress by taking gravity samples. Once gravity stops dropping for a couple days it'd done. We usually wait a week or so longer to allow the yeast time to clean up after themselves.
 
So i am thinking about throwing the 1.5-2 gallons of IPA i have left than remain from the geyser incident and either dry hopping or throwing some apricots (e.g., Aprihop) in with it. Any suggestions? It has been in the primary fermenter for a little over a week.
 

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