Air lock blow

[CarrieP]

yikes! Brewed our wort, boiled the hops and cooled it back down. Pitched the yeast at about 1:30pm. We did brew a yeast starter and had the yeast sitting in that for about 12-14 hours before adding it to the beer. Well come about 11:30 tonight, we had a blow out. Foam and beer through the airlock and overflow. This is our fourth batch of beer but the first that we used the yeast starter for. Never had anywhere near this robust of a fermentation! OG was around 1.045 or so. This was our second stout batch but a different type of stout.

After a brief web search, we decided to pull the lid and attach a runoff hose into a bucket of StarSan at the appropriate dilution. I’m hoping we haven’t messed this batch up too much! I did sanitize the lid and hose before putting it back on as well as the rim of the fermenter. Anyone else have this happen? Hoping we did the right thing as I’m looking forward to a good stout and I’d be bummed if it’s ruined now!

Does using a yeast starter really make this much of a difference? Wow!

 

[lowtones84]

You'll be fine Good work on getting the blowoff tube rigged up and everything sanitized again. For some reason stouts are a little more known for this, I forget why. But yes, a starter can lead to a much more vigorous, and healthy start. How much "head space" do you have between the liquid level and the top of your fermenting vessel? If it's 5 gallons in a regular brewing bucket, that's a lot of krausen, but certainly not unheard of.

 

[Jag75]

Yup this bad boy was fixing to pop . It had a slight whistle of the co2 trying to escape out the top of the airlock lol.

 

[Soulshine2]

looks typical of my carboy about 20 hrs into it.

 

[kh54s10]

It really doesn't have much to do with a starter although pitching the proper amount of yeast cells may make for more krausen. I start EVERY fermentation with a blow off tube installed. You really can never tell if a fermentation will blow or not. I have done similar recipes with the same yeast and one will blow off and another wont.

The amount of head space in your fermenter is also key. A bigger fermenter will have space for the krausen. Too much head space is detrimental though, more o2 and more chance of infection.

Control your fermentation temperatures to the middle of the yeasts optimum range and you will have fewer blow offs.

For the Starsan I use a margarine cup with about 1/2 inch of Starsan in the bottom, just enough to keep the end of the tube submerged. I put that in a bigger pot in case it overflows. Then you don't have the tube sitting in a gallon of Starsan, so if the fermenter goes cold you do not risk a reverse siphon sucking 1 gallon of Starsan into your beer.

 

[VirginiaHops1]

Happened to me the first time I used S-04, except mine blew my bung completely off and made a huge mess in my chest freezer. Beer turned out good though, actually one of my best batches thus far