flash
Active Member
I made this Geordie bitter kit on Friday evening 6pm,nothing special just 1kg of bke and 15g of EKG hop pellets boiled for an hour.I made a yeast starter from 2 packs of coopers yeast i had spare,one from an English bitter kit and the other from a cevesa kit,I could tell they were different strains just on appearance but I thought what the heck they're both ale yeasts so I bunged them both in.
8am Saturday morning:bloody hell it's gone mental,airlock absolutely caked in foamy gunk the lid and bottom of the bucket both bulging I gave it a nudge and it rocked gently to and fro I thought crikey she's going to blow so i whipped the airlock off sharpish.......BAD MOVE!
After cleaning the wall,ceiling,floor,radio,SWMBO's tablet and myself i put my thermometer down the bung hole to clear it out and take a temperature reading to make sure heat wasn't the cause of the explosive fermentation,20c no problems there so I put a clean airlock in and went back to bed for couple of hours.
10:30am and it's almost as bad as earlier,airlock clagged up again and lid bulging so I removed the air lock nice and gently having learned my lesson from before,big release of gas and some liquid but not as bad so i removed the lid which was covered in the browny green sludge I'd removed from my kitchen interior before and was greeted by a mega krausen so I cleaned the lid and the bung then scooped off the krausen (which was now right to the top of th fv) with a clean plastic jug I'd sprayed with starsan,it was mainly foam but there was almost a cupful of sludge scraped off the sides,anyway I put it all back together with a clean airlock and kept my eye on it.
2:30pm krausen has hit the lid of the fv again and is forcing it's way out of the air lock,time for a different approach,time to knock up a blow off tube.I have one of those airlocks with the lid that drops inside the the other half that has a pipe sticking up inside so ditched the lid and put my syphoning tube over the little pipe and the other end in a bottle with some sterilised water,I read about how to make it on this very forum some time ago and it works a treat and only took me a couple of minutes to knock it together as I had all bits handy which was lucky as the airlock on the fv was a foamy mess.
Blow off pipe connected and there's a lot foam going up the pipe but it's not on the floor which is the main thing.
4:30pm and it's still going strong the foam thats being pushed up the pipe is holding back the co2 so it's building up in the fv until the foam gets to end of the pipe then it comes out in thousands of little bubbles followed by massive rush of co2 into the bottle.I've filmed it so will see if I can upload it so you can see it for yourselves.
7:30 it's stopped pushing foam up the pipe but is still going like a goodun' so I've switched back over to a normal airlock and things are looking pretty normal.
I can honestly say I've never had such an involving day doing a one can kit,maybe combining two different yeasts was the cause of the super vigorous fermentation, I've done loads of kits in the past and had some pretty active fermentations but this was off the scale.
Who said brewing your own beer was boring.
8am Saturday morning:bloody hell it's gone mental,airlock absolutely caked in foamy gunk the lid and bottom of the bucket both bulging I gave it a nudge and it rocked gently to and fro I thought crikey she's going to blow so i whipped the airlock off sharpish.......BAD MOVE!
After cleaning the wall,ceiling,floor,radio,SWMBO's tablet and myself i put my thermometer down the bung hole to clear it out and take a temperature reading to make sure heat wasn't the cause of the explosive fermentation,20c no problems there so I put a clean airlock in and went back to bed for couple of hours.
10:30am and it's almost as bad as earlier,airlock clagged up again and lid bulging so I removed the air lock nice and gently having learned my lesson from before,big release of gas and some liquid but not as bad so i removed the lid which was covered in the browny green sludge I'd removed from my kitchen interior before and was greeted by a mega krausen so I cleaned the lid and the bung then scooped off the krausen (which was now right to the top of th fv) with a clean plastic jug I'd sprayed with starsan,it was mainly foam but there was almost a cupful of sludge scraped off the sides,anyway I put it all back together with a clean airlock and kept my eye on it.
2:30pm krausen has hit the lid of the fv again and is forcing it's way out of the air lock,time for a different approach,time to knock up a blow off tube.I have one of those airlocks with the lid that drops inside the the other half that has a pipe sticking up inside so ditched the lid and put my syphoning tube over the little pipe and the other end in a bottle with some sterilised water,I read about how to make it on this very forum some time ago and it works a treat and only took me a couple of minutes to knock it together as I had all bits handy which was lucky as the airlock on the fv was a foamy mess.
Blow off pipe connected and there's a lot foam going up the pipe but it's not on the floor which is the main thing.
4:30pm and it's still going strong the foam thats being pushed up the pipe is holding back the co2 so it's building up in the fv until the foam gets to end of the pipe then it comes out in thousands of little bubbles followed by massive rush of co2 into the bottle.I've filmed it so will see if I can upload it so you can see it for yourselves.
7:30 it's stopped pushing foam up the pipe but is still going like a goodun' so I've switched back over to a normal airlock and things are looking pretty normal.
I can honestly say I've never had such an involving day doing a one can kit,maybe combining two different yeasts was the cause of the super vigorous fermentation, I've done loads of kits in the past and had some pretty active fermentations but this was off the scale.
Who said brewing your own beer was boring.
