Music to My Eyes

Though I've made hundreds of batches of beer, I still get a tiny pang of anxiety with every brew. I expect it. I've even come to welcome it. I figure it's my soul's reminder that I truly care about putting out a great product.

It normally takes about 24 hours for fermentation to take off. If it doesn't, it can be for a number of reasons: underpitching yeast, bad yeast, improper temperature, poor oxygenation, etc. The day after a brew day, I anticipate seeing this:

The white, messy bucket is a blow-off bucket.  Once the yeast starts doing its job in the fermenter (the big steel vessel) it produces carbon dioxide, among other things.  That CO2 needs to go somewhere.  We vent it with tubing from the top of the fermenter, down to the floor and into a bucket of sanitized water.

If the yeast is especially active, a lot of foam is produced which can also make its way down the blow-off tube into the bucket.  That is what you see here.

This will calm down after about a day, and the fermentation will become gentler and slower.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this.  First, as you can see, it makes a big mess.  It cleans up fairly easily with hot water.

Second, you lose some beer.  Maybe five gallons or so.  Some brewers use a petroleum-based defoamer in their fermentation vessels.  It saves them this mess and it increases their yield. 

I do not do this.  You see, this defoamer is not very good for you.  Luckily it does not make its way into the finished beer.  However, it does settle out with the yeast.  I repitch yeast from one batch of beer to the next (as almost all brewers do) and I hate the thought of transferring that defoaming product into my next batch of beer.