Truly nothing better than to come home from a crap day at work to learn that the Belgian Wit was fermenting with such vigor as to blow the top off the airlock with krauseny goodness. The fermentation room smelled like beer and the bucket lid looked like the closing shot from some circle jerk pr0n video.

After an awesome Circle Family Dinner and some quality porch time I went back downstairs to address the “problem”. First I pulled the airlock and cleaned it up. When I went to return it to its spot, the beer vomited another round of krausen and filled it back up. Cleaned it up again and this time stole the tubing for the bottling wand and slipped it over the top of the airlock. I put the other end into a bowl of sanitizing solution and watched the beer blow bubbles for about 15 minutes.

This morning I checked on things and found another mess. Yay! The tube and bowl were all sludged up with goo. The beer was still blowing bubbles in the solution so the thing wasn’t all clogged up. It was hard to head off to work because I wanted to sit and watch. Damn tube is going to be a bitch to clean out. I wonder what kind of mess awaits my return tonight.

Not sure what the magic is here. First four brews never got much more than six inches of krausen but the last two have been crazy messy. I did make a yeast starter this time so maybe pitching a larger population has something to do with it. This doesn’t explain the nutter’s behavior though. The only other change was the addition of the wort chiller. Could it be pitching at <70˚F really makes that much of a difference?

At any rate, awesome problems to have. Adding a second action item before the next brew day: engineer a less messy blowout tube solution.

I’ve got pikkies on my phone. I’ll try to get them posted here too.