Following Jamil's 6 gallon recipes in the fermenter bucket

[grebe]

Should I just give up on the three piece air locks and go with blow off tubes? My dry stout is now discoloring the starsan in the air lock. This is after the pale ale I just did blew off three times in 24 hours.

Related question: after aeration (which I do by dumping the wort between buckets 4-5 times), there is a lot of foam on the top. Should i skim this off? I did on the pale ale but did not on the stout.

BTW, this is the dry stout recipe almost ver betum from Brewing Classic Styles. Only difference is I substituted Willamette hops for whatever it called for because i had it already. OG: 1.040

Also, from listening to the podcast, it doesnt really sound like I need to wait 2 weeks to bottle this...like it might be done fermenting and cleaning up within a week. Should I just stick to a two week schedule, or rack after fermentation ceases plus a couple days?

Peace,

grebe

[Ozwald]

I wouldn't worry too much about a little discolored liquid in the airlock. Just swap it out. That's why they make the 3 piece units instead of just those 1 piece 'S' shaped ones - easy cleaning. I only use a blowoff tube when the fermentation's blowing all over the place. That only lasts a day or 2 & I'll switch back to a 3 piece airlock for the rest of fermentation. I wouldn't worry about the foam after bucket-to-bucket aeration - that falls back into solution pretty quickly. Ask 10 brewers when to bottle & you'll get 12 different answers. My personal favorite: when it's done. If you wait a few days after terminal, you're safe. Not saying that's the best way, just that you won't be risking bottle bombs. I give mine a week to hit terminal (it's usually there around day 4, but I let the week finish out), then another week or two of batch aging depending on the recipe. I've been playing around with some session recipes lately & those tend to clean up a little quicker.

[hoodie]

You can try fermcap-S for the foam, but it's not going to hurt anything. Most ale fermentations will finish before 14 days, but racking too early can do more harm than leaving it alone.

[Dirk McLargeHuge]

My last two batches ( a barleywine and a dunkelweiss) both needed blow off tubes. I used an old three piece airlock to hastily cobble it together. After a couple of days, I put on a three piece airlock.

photo.JPG by homebrewer2005, on Flickr

[hoodie]

Do you just pull the tube out and add the rest of the airlock?

[Ozwald]

You can. If the foam got into it, I prefer to replace it with a clean one though.

[Dirk McLargeHuge]

Do you just pull the tube out and add the rest of the airlock?

I replaced it with a clean airlock. That's a permanent blow off assembly. Now.

[12stones]

Holy hell I keep getting shit in my airlock. The cream ale yeast is two weeks in and doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Every time I clean it, the next day there's more shit in it. I want this shit to end so I can dry hop it.