This is why you need blowoff tubes

AsharaDayne

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Put up a brew before leaving for holidays. It's one and the same beer (Saison with Fermentis BE-134) in 2 carboys, didn't have enough stuff for a regular bucket, but too much for one carboy.

Before I left, the krausen was already pushing through the airlocks as you can see in the pic attached. I knew it was risky not installing a blowoff tube... "calculated risk but man, am I bad at math" kind of thing.

Returning from 10 days away, the locks were completely gunked up with dried malty stuff, yummy. I took out the stops and just covered with aluminium foil, left for a total of 1 month, racked the content of the 2 carboys together and bottled from there. The brew smelled nice, but seemed to have an overtone of vinegar/cider or something - faint enough for the risk to be worth it, I thought. We shall see in a month or so if it's drinkable.

I think one of the carboys smelled more cidery than the other, but I didn't compare properly.
 

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i never ferment with one lol but i dont use carboys...

look forward to how it turns out.
 
This just happened to me yesterday with German Alt yeast. I knew was going to happen too. Carboy was too full, but I didn't want to end up with less beer, so I took the risk. Swapped out the a puking airlock in the morning before work, came home and there was yeast running down the carboy and puddling on the floor. Swapped it out again, hopefully that's the last of it. S#$T happens.
 
my fermenter is 23" tall and 15" wide and I leave 4" of head space and it still over flows every brew day, Ive been using plastic wrap the first 3 days just to keep from loosing yeast out the top
 
Heh I guess there's just no getting around it, beer's gonna foam. And carboys have next to no headspace... You'd have to leave them like half empty to avoid overflow. Note to self, order tubes.
 
I had this problem and spent about four weeks trying to clean up the mess from the carpet, so I can totally relate! Blowoff tubes, especially the 1" kind, are very expensive and need to be replaced pretty often because they are hard to clean. I learned to split my fermentation across two 5 gallon carboys to help prevent this from happening again. So far, so good. (Although it does mean you have to invest in another carboy but at least its a one-time investment.)
 
I soak my tubes in oxiclean and then starsan, so far it's worked pretty well.
 
I just have these 2 1-gallon carboys that I got for free. I don't really like using them, it's a big PITA for a small amount of beer... and if I don't fill them up, I feel like I'm really losing out.
Great for doing experiments though.

Anyway, this turned into a very nice beer, intensely fruity, great taste. I'm actually rebrewing a bigger batch right now - without the overflow though.
For context, it's an about 1.050 brew, Pale Ale DME + 6.6% steeping carapils/carared, 45 min boil, Polaris (relatively old), Saazer and a pinch of Sorachi Ace to ~40 IBU. I know, specialty hops should go in late...:rolleyes:
 

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