Quick question on bubbler?

I'm making my 4th batch and this one is quite different. I have been using the conventional plastic bubbler that I put some stars an in. We'll this time it continues to push all the stars an out of the top. It was empty for I think about 12 hours before I caught it. Now it continues to push it out. I put a piece of tubing in the bung and put about 1/4-1/2 cup of water starsan mix in a container that the LME came in, with the tubing sitting in the liquid. Is this ok?

 

Sounds like you made a blowoff tube, and it'll work fine.

Also, what you're calling a bubbler, we generally call an air-lock (I thought this was going to be about a plastic carboy).

It's strange that all your water it coming out of your airlock though... I'm not quite sure how that's happening. It's normal that it bubbles a lot... when you say conventional, do you mean one like this, or an s-type like this? Either way, is the lid on it?

 

It's the s type. Yes the lid was on it. It was causing the liquid to foam and it pushed it out. This is the first time using starsan, I was using iostar. Did I hurt my brew with it not having and liquid to bubble for 12 hours? I brewed the beer last Friday.

 

I think you probably just had too high of a starsan to water ratio. When too much concentrate is mixed with the water it foams A LOT.

 

Unlikely you hurt anything. You have a positive pressure from your brew pushing any nasties away from the airlock by virtue of offgassing the CO2 produced by the yeast making the alcohol.

 

^ +1 (edit: this was for WayFrae's post... got ninja'd by Newsman... who I guess I also +1, since we pretty much said the same thing.)

It won't hurt your beer at all... with it actively fermenting, it's pumping out C02, which is all escaping out the blowoff, so I doubt anything that could hurt it would've got in there.

 

the s shaped airlocks, are you supposed to use the cap on top?

 

Pretty sure you are.

 

Yeah I always keep the caps on my airlocks... I don't really think anything will get in there then make its way into the beer, but I don't really want anything falling in there regardless...