asterix404
Well-Known Member
So I have been brewing for a while now and I noticed that I continue to seem to have problems with my beer in the secondary. So first off I am currently making a whit beer around 5% so rather light, nothing out of the ordinary, 2 cans of malt, 1 pound of dry malt, a few ounces of hops.
I put the wort into a 7g plastic bucket, wait for the right temperature and pure in the vial of the white labs yeast. I don't make a primer, I know I should but right now I don't and my beer comes out well. I let it sit in the bucket for about a week, fermentation happens, lots of bubbles it's awesome, after a week I open it up and there is a very thick head. Mostly it's the hops I think. I pipe it into the 5g glass secondary, put a stop gap on it and wait. There is about 4 or 5 inches of room in the carboy.
This time about 24h later I go down to find that the beer, which was rather still upon being put into the secondary, is over flowing out of the stop gap, so I quickly remove it and hear a suction sound and repressurization. It continue to bubble over, alot... I mean after an hour it was still going, and finally I just transferred it back to the bucket.
I thought about what I did wrong and realized that I didn't actually stir the yeast when I added it to the wart, but I did shake it around a lot. There were no bubbles coming from the bucket stop gap when I transferred it.
So my theory basically is that there was a huge amount of mixing in the piping of the beer, and the yeast were truly evenly distributed and found a lot more food and just started going to town on it. Given that there wasn't too much room in the glass it just overflowed. My question though is, how can I prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future and does my theory make sense and if there is a thick head in the primary does that mean that it isn't done in there yet?
Oh right! I don't think sanitation was the culprit as I used star san to the letter and I am VERY careful about making sure that everything is very clean and sanitized, also when I have had overflows in the past the beer came out wonderfully so I don't think it's a nasty bacteria.
Thanks a ton!
I put the wort into a 7g plastic bucket, wait for the right temperature and pure in the vial of the white labs yeast. I don't make a primer, I know I should but right now I don't and my beer comes out well. I let it sit in the bucket for about a week, fermentation happens, lots of bubbles it's awesome, after a week I open it up and there is a very thick head. Mostly it's the hops I think. I pipe it into the 5g glass secondary, put a stop gap on it and wait. There is about 4 or 5 inches of room in the carboy.
This time about 24h later I go down to find that the beer, which was rather still upon being put into the secondary, is over flowing out of the stop gap, so I quickly remove it and hear a suction sound and repressurization. It continue to bubble over, alot... I mean after an hour it was still going, and finally I just transferred it back to the bucket.
I thought about what I did wrong and realized that I didn't actually stir the yeast when I added it to the wart, but I did shake it around a lot. There were no bubbles coming from the bucket stop gap when I transferred it.
So my theory basically is that there was a huge amount of mixing in the piping of the beer, and the yeast were truly evenly distributed and found a lot more food and just started going to town on it. Given that there wasn't too much room in the glass it just overflowed. My question though is, how can I prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future and does my theory make sense and if there is a thick head in the primary does that mean that it isn't done in there yet?
Oh right! I don't think sanitation was the culprit as I used star san to the letter and I am VERY careful about making sure that everything is very clean and sanitized, also when I have had overflows in the past the beer came out wonderfully so I don't think it's a nasty bacteria.
Thanks a ton!