• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

Stored beer is now VERY foamy

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

wabn8c

Member
Joined
Feb 10, 2015
Messages
15
Reaction score
0
Ok, I have an amber ale that I carbonated in my my keezer at 12psi. I needed the space in my keezer to carbonate another beer, so I took the amber ale off gas and put it in my basement. After sitting in my basement for about a month, I put the amber ale back on gas and hooked up to serve. I've got nothing but foam coming out VERY fast. I've tried bleeding the gas off but it blows beer out of the release valve. I've left it in the keezer for 24 hours to try and settle out but it's still just as bad. It's blowing beer back into the CO2 lines and making a mess. I'm still serving on 12 psi and my outgoing line is 10 ft long and I've never had this type of foaming problem before. Does anybody know what could be causing so much foam that's coming out fast...like it's on 50 psi? My other taps are serving fine with no foam.
 
Two possibilities comes to mind:

- the beer had not yet reached true FG, and parking it at basement temp's for a month let it ferment the rest of the way, raising the CO2 pressure in the keg and jacking up the carbonation level.

- Or there was a critter in that keg that ate the things that brewer yeast can't, and at the basement temperature was able to do its thing and produce its shared of CO2 in the sealed keg.

Either way, at the least, you need to vent the keg to bring the carbonation level down from the stratosphere to something reasonable. A quick beer shower is a small price to pay...

Cheers! ;)
 
This is when a spunding valve is very handy. you set the pressure you want to keep in the keg, and the valve will vent off excess pressure, and then seal when the set pressure is reached. As the beer continues to offgas over time, the spunding will continue to vent the excess.

Now, I would also recommend adding check valves to your gas system to prevent any possible damage from beer backflowing through the CO2 lines. I would also either replace the lines, or sanitize them to make sure they do not get innoculated, or at minimum provide a breeding ground for future infections.

Once you get the carbonation down to the right levels, tasting it will give you a better idea of what happened, and whether you need to examine your process to prevent future possible infections.
 
Back
Top