OVHA Chat

Brewed a batch of Honey Wheat this weekend. Decided to try a Munton's no boil can kit, for the heck of it.
We used 2 lbs Wheat DME.
1# honey. A tad too much, maybe by a half pound. But CO-OP man thought it would be OK.
Liquid Hefewiezen yeast from CO-OP.
Fermented at 78 degrees for first 8 hours or so.
Problem. The thing went wild. Tried to blow the lid off of the bucket. 15 hours into it, I happened to walk by and heard the lid whistling as it was under so much pressure. I removed the airlock and fitted another one with a blow off tube and it is blowing into a bucket. The thing sounded like someone was throwing up in a closet. Don't ask how I know what this sounds like. I'll change the blow off set up tonight and go back to the regular airlock.
Any ideas why we got a free episode of Spring Break Yeast's Go Wild (video for sale for $9.99) ?
Mainly to prevent this from occuring when I am not home and my wife shutting down our still youthful brewing operation.

My last cream stout fermented so vigourously that it clogged the airlock and blew sticky chunks of malty goodness all over the inside of my refridgerator. I was fermenting in the low 60s with Safale 04. Blowoff tubes from here on out for me!

MMMmmm Malty Goodness.
I guess you are right, we will just start the process with a blowoff tube, and switch to the airlock when it settles. That is what happened with us, the airlock inlet points clogged with 'malty goodness' and went downhill from there.

Wheat fermentations always spew a lot of stuff. I've taken to just using blowoff tubes the entire time for my beers now.

78 is pretty high too - if you can get it around 68 to 70 or so that would help, and will also produce a cleaner-tasting beer.

There is some foam control liquid that I use and it seems to help some as well with no ill effects to the beer. Example : http://morebeer.com/browse.html?PHPSESS ... mit=Search

I've noticed that even when there is alot of foam it's not a problem when brewing 5 gallons in a 6 gallon container. Definitly need a blow off tube if fermenting 5 gallons in a 5 gallon glass carboy.

Buddy's closet looked like someone murdered a 6 pack of guinness after one such air lock clogging episode.

-peace

POST MORTUM
Alas, he screamed in terror "The batch is bad, the batch is bad".
"Aaaarrgghh, we've lost a whole batch of beer".
Something wild must have gotten in there. It was still fermenting after 2 weeks, when we tried to bottle last weekend. Heavy sulfur smell, and we were afraid to even try and bottle it.
This was certainly a hard lesson. To pour 5 gal of beer, into the septic system, even if it was bad, just seemed so inhuman.