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Within 48 hours of starting fermentation, the airlock at the top of your fermentation vessel should start bubbling as the yeast produce CO2. Here’s the carboy containing our India Pale Ale, 24 hrs after starting fermentation.

You can see small bubbles in the airlock at the top of the carboy, and if this picture were moving, you’d see the small plastic insert inside the airlock bubbling a few times a minute.  However, you can also see the croizen (foam) at the top of the beer within the carboy getting dangerously close to the top of the vessel.  Obviously, this presents a dilemma.

There is little space at the top of the carboy for CO2 to collect, and it is also difficult to escape, as you are trying to limit exposure of the beer to the outside world for fear of contamination by various critters in your cellar-like basement.  Keeping it mostly sealed yields the possibility that you are forming a “beer bomb” that could explode due to the increasing pressure within the sealed vessel.

Therefore, taking my boss’ advice (who’s had this problem in the past), we did the following:

This picture is of the Hefeweizen, a beer that was already filled too high because I overfilled it with water.  Since taking this picture, I’ve also set up the IPA carboy to do the same thing.

Basically, we kept the rubber stopper in the top of the carboy, but rather than use the airlock, we took silicone tubing that came with the beer kit to allow the foam and air to escape into another vessel.  You can see the foam inside the tube, and collecting in the Mason jar Brooke set up to catch the croizen that is escaping from the carboy.

While not ideal, it should help limit contamination as long as we don’t leave it like this permanently.  With the near constant flow of croizen through the tube, bacteria/insects/mice probably won’t be going backwards toward the beer.  Also, the brunt of the croizen production occurs within the first few days, so I’ll be able to remove the tubing and replace it with the original airlock again shortly.

We didn’t have this problem when we were using the 5 gal plastic bucket because there was plenty of space at the top for air to expand into.  Also, the design of the airlock we were using may have been a bit better suited for allowing at least some of the CO2 to escape.  And finally, any time I would open that thing up, all that excess CO2 could escape rapidly, rather than trying to fit all of it through a relatively small opening at the top of a carboy.

Regardless, it’s interesting to see the process in action through glass.  I may only use glass carboys for the secondary fermentation process in the future, to help prevent this kind of thing from occurring, but I’m still glad we did it this way.

While Meg was staying at her grandparents house in Hannibal, Brooke and I took it upon ourselves to brew not one, but two, beers in a single day.  From start to finish, the entire process took almost 10 hours, but most of that time was spent cooling down the “wort” (i.e. unfermented beer).  I think we’ll need to invest in a wort chiller, as my chosen method of cooling the pots from boiling down to ~70 F, involving placing the pot outside in the snow, didn’t really speed things up in the least.

Another change this time around involved brewing the beer in glass carboys, borrowed from my Dad who used to use them for brewing wine.  There are advantages and disadvantages to using these things.  One advantage is that they’re glass, so you can see through them to view how your brewing process is going.  Also, being glass, it is less likely that after years of use, you’ll have residual flavors being imparted by your fermentation vessel, as plastic can do (but really won’t for quite a long time).

One disadvantage, however, is that they’re kinda a pain to clean.  We’ve got a brush that is designed for scrubbing carboys, but due to the small opening at the top of the fermentation vessel, it’s just hard to sterilize the carboy properly.  I think I did a good enough job, but we’ll see.  It’s also very difficult to fill the thing up, due to the aforementioned small opening at the top.  Brooke had to hold a funnel in order for me to take the pot pictured above and pour into the carboy.  It becomes a two-person process, whereas one person could probably do alright using the 5 gal bucket. Finally, it is difficult to know what volume you actually have in these things.  I needed 5 gal in total, and in trying to cool the beer down faster, I poured spring water into the bottom of the carboy before adding the Hefeweizen wort.  As you can see in the picture above, on the right, the beer is pretty close to the top, largely because I had too much volume in there.  This also affected the initial Specific Gravity reading of the wort, which could affect my alcohol calculations toward the end of fermentation.

Another concern with these beers is that the temperature in our basement has dropped since the last time we brewed.  The thermometer is reading consistently around 50 F, if not slightly below, making me wonder how long fermentation will take.

However, after 24 hours downstairs, the yeast had taken off.  [Note: That was another change.  Instead of using liquid yeast, we used the dry yeast the kits normally come with.  I’d never done it this way, but Brooke makes bread regularly, so she’s familiar with what needs to be done.  They worked!]  I may take another picture later this week, but the foam at the top (croizen) is increasing steadily to the point where I had to remove the CO2 trap at the top of the carboy and put a tube in its place.  The tube is running down into a jar that Brooke grabbed, semi-sealed with aluminum foil.  It isn’t the most ideal situation, but it’s the only reasonable option in order to let some of that foam out of the fermentation vessel.  Otherwise, the foam actually pushes out of the carboy and into the CO2 trap at the top.  After a few days of letting the croizen bubble out, I’ll replace the trap, as bubbling will have slowed to some degree.

Regardless, despite all the various changes this time around, it appears that fermentation has begun!  In theory, the Hefeweizen should be ready for bottling in about 2 weeks and the IPA should be ready for bottling in about 6 weeks.  I’ll be transferring the IPA from its primary vessel into a secondary vessel at some point, either the 5 gal plastic bucket from last time, or I’ll put it in the glass carboy that the Hefeweizen is currently inhabiting.  Probably a few weeks down the road.