Dancing Better Bottle

I did a Northern Brewer Wee Heavy (1.082OG) last week and thought it would be amusing to watch the yeasty carnage, so I put a web cam on it and started taking pics every minute. The result is the below time lapse that takes place over the first three days of fermentation.

It was quite interesting to see the BB dance around as the pressure was built and relieved. A little scary too. It was too slow to see it moving like this in real time, but it was only revealed through the time lapse.

This is around 3300 frames played back at 24fps. I just wish I had used a better camera instead of the crappy built-in webcam on my netbook. Next time, I'll use and actual digicam.

 

That was cool!

 

Very cool. You know you're a homebrewer when you post a video of your fermentation.

 

Go baby go! Classic blow off fermentation. It blows krausen for the first day or two,then just blowing off a ton of co2. Looked like a real good fermentation.

 

really cool

 

You almost needed a blow off for your blow off there. Might want to look into some sort of temp control for your fermentation.

Cool video, thanks for posting.

 

Money shot of the krausen travelling through the blow off tube. Ferm porn at its best. You should add audio of classic porn soundtrack. Bwaam chicka bow wow

 

Or when you watch a video of someone else's fermentation!

 

I could have put it in the basement, which is generally about 10 degrees cooler, but that would have been pushing the low side of the yeast's range. Although, this was pushing the high side. *shrug* Honestly didn't occur to me.

 

Awesome.

 

Cool! I may want to try this...what did you use to put this together?

 

ya know what would have been real cool? A video with an airlock, instead of the blow off tube set up.

 

Great idea. For some reason watching fermentation never gets old to me. Looks like you lost about an inch of beer to all that blowout.

 

Also: my wife didn't think that video was nearly as cool as I did.

 

Is it bad that I kind of wanted to see it blow the bung and shoot krausen all over the place? Not that I want to see the waste, but you know how people kinda wanna see fights at hockey games and crashes at NASCAR... Entertaining video though. I watched straight to the end and found it to be a great drama. Why can't hollywood have such nice storylines like this? Yeast meets sugars, fermentation ensues...

 

I looked over my shoulder before I put it on....

 

That video is wild. I've never seen something like that, but then all my beers have been 1.050 or below so far.

 

Very cool.

 

I've had several 1.04X beers do the same thing. a healthy yeast pitch is what causes it.

 

That was pretty gnarly! Good ole zymology in action!

 

That Krausen is one lucky German guy. Zoom!

I am so sorry.

 

Very cool...thanks for sharing!

Out of curiousity...why do you switch from blow off tube to airlock towards the end?

 

usually after the blowoff period is done you switch from blowoff to airlock to prevent suckback pulling a bucketload of nastiness back in if there are temp/pressure fluctuations.

 

I was noting the LC temperature strip and saw the yeast took that batch from 68°F up to 72°F in fairly short order and kept it there for most of the boisterous phase. Not that big a gain, considering (and A Good Thing). I'm guessing that basement was pretty cool while this was going on.

And what kind of yeast was this?

Cheers!

 

That's not the basement, that's my first floor. don't let the open stud walls fool you. I'm in perpetual remodeling, but still have time to brew. Hey, my priorities are straight. Anyway, the house thermostat is 65 at night, 70 during the day. I'll have to move the fermentation into the basement soon with spring (finally) getting here.

It was the Wyeast Scottish Ale, 1728. Did a 2-liter starter on a stir plate for about 36 hours prior to brewing.

 

The webcam was built into a Gateway Netbook. Software for acquisition is called Yawcam (Yet Another Webcam). It's a free download and has some fairly nice features if you're using a "webcam". It also has a built-in http server that allowed my to watch it real-time, but you have to open up ports on your router.

To put the video together, I used Virtual Dub. It will take a series of .jpgs and stream them into an .avi video.

Some things I would change if I did it again (and I probably will):
Instead of a webcam, I'll use a Canon A520. Cheap, compact digicam that takes great pictures considering it's 5+ years old. I can control this with a program called GB Timelapse, that will control any Canon digicam. This way, I can set the exposure to auto and it will compensate for changing light conditions throughout the day. Higher resolution will be nice, too.

I'll change the time between exposures to 30 seconds instead of one minute. All this happened much faster than I anticipated.

Start taking pics as soon as the yeast is pitched to catch the whole life cycle of the ferment.

 

Everyone wants to see the explosions.

Paint your own ceiling with beer.

 

That is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

 

So, a NASCAR fan, then?

Cheers!

 

That's awsome. Been thinking about doing the same thing with a Go-Pro, but that big blow-off was great....not sure I could match that.