Thought I'd try a Bure Gold kit in my new Fermzilla, mainly so that I could get the hang of pressure fermenting and oxygen-free dry hop / transfers with this vessel before introducing more variables in the shape of one my own recipes. The kit recommended adding the included hops on day 4, but my fermentation was moving along faster as Ive been at 10 PSI / 19 ℃ since day two, and with SG already at 1.015 on day three I decided to throw out the accumulated trub from the collection jar and then use the cleaned, oxygen-purged jar for dry hopping. Fool. Turns out that what I thought was trub was actually yeast, more than the whole jar, with just a tiny amount of actual crud left in the very bottom.
Once the collection jar was off (with a good portion of the contents covering my knees and the brewery floor) there was no way I could safely reintroduce that lot, so I went and cleaned the jar to prepare it for purging and dry hopping. Once it was reattached and the butterfly valve opened the jar rapidly filled with brew and also with about 1.5" of yeast which had settled on top of the butterfly valve.
I left it alone and pressure started to build up again, though quite a bit more slowly than it did before. Now I'm a bit confused. I thought that once the yeast starts to settle on the bottom it's effectively finished what it was doing, but the stuff I chucked out yesterday looked OK, and the remains that are in there now are very much active, with little bits becoming detached and floating up to the surface before dropping down again. Before I dumped the trub there was a small amount of foam on top of the vessel, directly above the trial jar:
To me it looks as though it's the yeast that's sitting in the trial jar which is producing the CO2. I wanted to dry hop at that point as the Krausen had receded at a rate which made me wonder how much more the yeast had to give, a thought that was backed up by the SG. I'm fairly sure that this was the right time to dry-hop, but I couldn't do that using a collection jar full of gunk, so it had to go.
Long story short: have I ruined it? Should I do something different next time? Rigging up an alternative means of dry-hopping is a possibility, and I've seen several options, but that depends on how badly (if at all) I have affected the brew by dumping that yeast / trub.
Once the collection jar was off (with a good portion of the contents covering my knees and the brewery floor) there was no way I could safely reintroduce that lot, so I went and cleaned the jar to prepare it for purging and dry hopping. Once it was reattached and the butterfly valve opened the jar rapidly filled with brew and also with about 1.5" of yeast which had settled on top of the butterfly valve.
I left it alone and pressure started to build up again, though quite a bit more slowly than it did before. Now I'm a bit confused. I thought that once the yeast starts to settle on the bottom it's effectively finished what it was doing, but the stuff I chucked out yesterday looked OK, and the remains that are in there now are very much active, with little bits becoming detached and floating up to the surface before dropping down again. Before I dumped the trub there was a small amount of foam on top of the vessel, directly above the trial jar:
To me it looks as though it's the yeast that's sitting in the trial jar which is producing the CO2. I wanted to dry hop at that point as the Krausen had receded at a rate which made me wonder how much more the yeast had to give, a thought that was backed up by the SG. I'm fairly sure that this was the right time to dry-hop, but I couldn't do that using a collection jar full of gunk, so it had to go.
Long story short: have I ruined it? Should I do something different next time? Rigging up an alternative means of dry-hopping is a possibility, and I've seen several options, but that depends on how badly (if at all) I have affected the brew by dumping that yeast / trub.
