chs9
Well-Known Member
First post, here it goes...
My roommate and I have finally moved away from brewing from premade "kits" and chose a belgian golden ale clone to brew ourselves - I don't remember the name, I can look it up when I get home.
Anyway, so it requires 8 lbs of DME for a 5 gallon boil - more than twice as much as comes with those kits. So, brewed it up 5 days ago and it was pumping out CO2 like crazy, way more than our prior beers have. Today, we woke up and a bunch of wet yeast (~1/3 cup?) spooged out of our S-shape airlock. We rinsed it out and put it back in the primary fermenter (a food grade bucket). A pressure head built in a few minutes and it started bubbling at a reasonable pace, maybe 1 bubble per 30-60 seconds. Then it went nuts and bubbled out a huge amount of CO2.
My problem is - it seems that the head is so viscous that co2 bubbles are able to grow to relatively large sizes before they're able to escape, and we have had this yeast eruption. What can we do? We were talking about transferring it to the secondary tonight (a 5 gal glass carboy) so that the airlock is higher above the head. Any suggestions? Is there some way to prevent this in the future?
Thanks
EDIT: We're fermenting in a 6.5 gallon bucket with an S-type airlock. The bucket is in a T controlled bath in a large cooler where we maintain ~66-70 F. We're using a Wyeast Belgian Abbey II yeast, I don't know the number offhand.
My roommate and I have finally moved away from brewing from premade "kits" and chose a belgian golden ale clone to brew ourselves - I don't remember the name, I can look it up when I get home.
Anyway, so it requires 8 lbs of DME for a 5 gallon boil - more than twice as much as comes with those kits. So, brewed it up 5 days ago and it was pumping out CO2 like crazy, way more than our prior beers have. Today, we woke up and a bunch of wet yeast (~1/3 cup?) spooged out of our S-shape airlock. We rinsed it out and put it back in the primary fermenter (a food grade bucket). A pressure head built in a few minutes and it started bubbling at a reasonable pace, maybe 1 bubble per 30-60 seconds. Then it went nuts and bubbled out a huge amount of CO2.
My problem is - it seems that the head is so viscous that co2 bubbles are able to grow to relatively large sizes before they're able to escape, and we have had this yeast eruption. What can we do? We were talking about transferring it to the secondary tonight (a 5 gal glass carboy) so that the airlock is higher above the head. Any suggestions? Is there some way to prevent this in the future?
Thanks
EDIT: We're fermenting in a 6.5 gallon bucket with an S-type airlock. The bucket is in a T controlled bath in a large cooler where we maintain ~66-70 F. We're using a Wyeast Belgian Abbey II yeast, I don't know the number offhand.