Steeping black malt in secondary..... foam over?

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SanPancho

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so that pretty much sums it up. hate the acrid roast/burnt note from black malts, have tried all the dehusked ones too, was trying to see if i could do a steep in secondary to pick up color and just the lightest bit of flavor possible from some midnight wheat.

pulled off a gallon, added 1/2 oz milled midnight wheat and..... started foaming over and out of the carboy.

maybe the acidic nature of the wheat is causing a reaction and co2 is releasing? otherwise i cant figure it out, we're at room temp, there shouldnt be that much dissolved co2 in the beer. weird.

in any case, once it settles i'll dry hop and see what happens. but curious what the hell is going on here....?

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My guess is it is just a release of CO2.

Are you saying you just took some roasted malt crushed it and put it in the fermenter? That would be a pretty big concern for a lacto infection. While roasted malt may have been heated to a point of killing lacto initially they are still stored and surrounded by avery other malt that still has lacto alive and well on it.
 
yep. but im not concerned with lacto. the IBUs are in the low 40s(calculated), and ABV is already north of 5%, so i would frankly be shocked if lacto took a foothold here.

im thinking its co2 as well, but it just seems strange to get so much coming out of solution when the beer is basically at room temp.
 
so, i dont have anything regarding the flavor picked up from the wheat steeping, but its only been about an hour and this is the color change so far. pretty remarkable. i'm hoping i get just the lightest touch of roasted flavor to go with it.

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I've had similar foam overs when dry hopping in a 1 gallon jug. Everything seems fine, then you give it a good swirl to mix the hops in and bam. There is a lot of dissolved CO2 in freshly fermented beer, even at room temperature. All the grain dust will provide tons of nucleation sites for the CO2 to grab onto and form bubbles.
 
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