Homebrew in Paradise, the only homebrew shop I know of on Oahu, has very limited hours. They're not open on Sundays, they're not open on Mondays, and they're only open from noon to 5 pm on Tuesday through Friday. On Saturday they open up a bit earlier, but they still close by 5 pm.
I wanted to brew a beer on Sunday, December 29th, and my plan was to drop by on Saturday to pick up the ingredients. Saturday morning I went for a hike, Saturday afternoon I was at the beach. I remembered that the homebrew shop had longer hours on Saturdays, but I thought that meant they stayed open later. When I finally realized that they close at five on Saturdays too, it was twenty past four.
I jumped on my moped and raced over there. I got there at ten minutes to closing, so I started grabbing everything as quickly as I could. In the end, I forgot one crucial item: an air lock. The kit I bought from them a few weeks back only came with one airlock, and it was still in use on the surprisingly high gravity beer I brewed three weeks ago. That beer is still bubbling, so I don't want to bottle it yet. And that means the airlock is occupied.
So, on Sunday, after brewing a new recipe I'm developing called Southern Breakfast Stout (which is an Oatmeal Stout spiced with molasses), I had no airlock for the fermenter. I decided to jerry-rig an airlock, which you see in the above picture.
The airlock worked well enough for the first 24 hours, and it might have kept on working too, but my uptight nature wouldn't let me leave it be. See, the fermentation kicked off strong, and twelve hours into fermentation the cup in my pseudo airlock was overflowing with foam. Hawaii is cockroach country, and when I spied a cockroach coming round to sip the spilled suds, I got paranoid. I worried that if I left a puddle of sugary wort on the floor, that one lush of a cockroach would soon have a whole party going. So I decided to clean it up.
I mopped the floor, wiped down the fermenter, and changed the cup. But, in the process of all that, the tube coming out of the fermenter came loose. And when I got it back in place, it wouldn't bubble anymore.
That was New Year's Eve. My girlfriend was hollering for me to hurry up--we were on our way out--so I left it as it was. I had hopes that the pressure in the fermenter would return to bubbling levels if given time.
The next morning, it still wasn't bubbling. I disassembled and reassembled the makeshift airlock, and still no bubbles. I'm not sure if the seal on the fermenter wasn't good, and was letting air out somewhere else and thereby not running it through the bubble cup. I don't think that was the case though, because it didn't smell like beer near the fermenter.
Another thought is that somehow, during my hurried fumbling with the airlock, I contaminated the beer, and the contamination knocked the yeast out of its cycle. Or a final idea is that the yeast finished with all the sugars really quick, before I got a good seal set up again, and is now lying dormant. Or maybe CO2 built up in the fermenter during the time without a good-working airlock, and poisoned the yeast with its own waste product.
In any case, I'm kicking myself for not getting an airlock when I picked up ingredients, and for not being more careful when I tried to fix the foam-over. The best next-steps I could come up with at this point were: pick up a proper airlock and another carboy as soon as possible, transferring the beer to a secondary fermenter and sealing it up again, and testing the gravity and the taste at that time, to assess whether fermentation really did finish, and/or whether the beer has been spoiled. I did all of the above, and tomorrow I'll post about my findings.
No comments:
Post a Comment