gottacheckit

Anyone else get the Gottacheckits with a new brew?
I find myself wanting to go check the fermenter every 30 mins every time I start a new batch it's like an obsession I don't have to touch anything but I must go peek at it at least 10 times a day for the first 3/4 days lol

Anyone else?

 

I use a swamp cooler with ice bottles, so it's a necessity for me, but not quite that often.

 

Not here. I put together a mead a short while back and put it in the basement closet since it was the coolest place in the house.

After about a week I had to go in there and found it. So much for degassing and feeding it nutrients on a regular basis!

I often just go look in my ferm chamber to make sure I didn't forget I had some beer in there I forgot about!

 

I did that on my first couple of brews five + years ago. After that I was only checking the temperature with the swamp cooler. Now that I use fermentation chambers I "set it and forget it!".

The novelty should wear off then you can get some rest...

 

When I have a batch fermenting, I check it twice a day, when I get up in the morning, and when I get home from work. I check the temp on the controller, and open the freezer to check activity and to make sure there is no mess that I need to clean up. My last batch ( a Hefeweizen using WLP300) was fine during primary in a 60L Speidel. After racking to a 5gal carboy with blood orange puree before work one saturday, I had krausen pushing out of the airlock when I got home and had to pop on a blow off hose.

 

Once the wort gets the yeast pitched I don't ever see it again until it gets poured into a glass, but I'm paranoid about oxidation.

 

Just completed my 19th batch so I'm getting better, but I'll check it until fermentation begins, check a couple more times to make sure I am not going to have a blowoff problem, and maybe once a day after that.

It's not so much the gottacheckits as it is I'm still learning about the pace and tempo of brewing.

My 19th batch is Biermuncher's Cream of Three Crops; for the first time I used my ferm chamber (refrigerator w/ Inkbird controller) which kept it at 65 degrees. It took almost 24 hours to take off, and then an entire week of fermentation before the krausen finally dropped.

What did I learn? S-05 is slower than S-04 by quite a bit. Might be a function of having a steady 65 degrees where often S-04 is so vigorous the temp rises by 4 degrees or so.

I just ramped up to 71 degrees to allow the yeast to finish. Krausen has fallen, and I'll leave it for a couple days. Then back down a bit for a while and cold crashing.

So I'd say in my case, I'm past the impatience phase of being a new brewer (it was strong in this one!), and at the data-gathering stage. Maybe this is due to having a fair amount of beer in the pipeline so I'm not so anxious to get this next batch kegged.

I've got a SMASH that I brewed on August 28th, kept in the basement using a swamp cooler to keep temps down. Once primary fermentation stopped I ramped up to 71 for a couple days, then let it come back down to ambient (65 degrees). It's been sitting now for, what, 17 days or so? In a discussion in another thread I noted how I needed 2-4 weeks of conditioning in a keg for green beer to settle down. RM-MN suggested leaving the beer in the fermenter longer, so I'm trying that.