The Fabled Ferocious Fermentation.. Really?

By Malty Mike

Well I can't really decide if this is good or bad.

The angel to my right says I know my beer is fermenting, but the devil... the hot sexy devil, is telling me that a strain of wild yeast may have found its way into my fermenter.

Angey, the angel, quickly replied that at least the temperature in the fermenter room, aka closet, was the right temperature, but then again Elizabeth Hurley is telling me the portable heater with auto sensor set to 66 probably shouldn't have been pointing so close to the fermenter.

Well after deciding there's nothing these 2 fine ladies could help me with at this moment, I turned to my very own fine lady to look up the problem on various forums and websites as I tended to the cleanup. I whipped up a cup of EasyClean, less than a teaspoon for the little red cup, and started cleaning off the airlock and the lid. I have to admit I was panicking quite a bit at this point because although I had heard of stuff like this happening, I never expected it to happen on my first batch. I was sure something was wrong. The bubbles kept getting denser and denser and the "sanitizing solution" kept looking more and more like wort.

By the time I cleaned it up Erika had read enough forums to tell me I should probably just clean out the airlock and see if it happens again. So i quickly do that and within 5 minutes I see the stupid, mean, insensitive bubbles forming their very unwelcomed mosh pit on top of my airlock again. So the next piece of advice I got was to make a blowoff tube. Supposedly I could put my airlock in my fermentor and hook my bottling siphon tubing directly to the airlock and make my own little blowoff tube. This is so many words.. did not work. The tube was slightly smaller than the airlock passthrough, too small to get over airlock, too large to be stuffed in it. After what seemed like hours but im sure may have been closer to 15 minutes, I realized, if the tube is approximately the same size as the airlock, well then cant I just insert to tube. SO i try that and it seems to fit reasonably well. I whip up another batch of easyclean solution, this time about a half a gallon, for the other end of the airlock and boom problem seemingly solved.

Its a little scary to see all these bubbles and gross stuff running through the tube I am supposed to sanitize and use as my siphoning tube but it had to be done right. After about a day the major fermenting seemed to have subsided and I reinserted the airlock and my "major catastrophe was over." Here are some pics of the final rig.