If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The brew, just before the lid went on (don’t worry - we’re not keeping it either beside the radiator, or on the carpet)

There’s a monster in the kitchen of which we’ve rapidly lost control. We decided to start brewing beer this weekend. It was a four-dayer, after all. So we got ourselves a fermenter, which is really just a five gallon container with a lid and marks up the side, and mixed up our sugar, water, malt and yeast.

We snapped on the lid and… nothing. It really looked like a wash-out, which after our disastrous experiments with home-made hot cross buns (don’t ask) wouldn’t have been such a surprise.

Anyhow, that was Sunday morning. Yesterday.

This morning, we got up to a feint smell of beer in the hall, and looking through the side of the fermenter you could see those cloudy ripples you get down the sides of a freshly-pulled pint. There was tension in the lid of the fermenter, too, which was starting to raise slightly. Yesterday it had been totally flat.

Not wanting to have it explode, we snapped open a corner of the lid to release some of the pressure, then pressed it shut again and walked away. A couple of hours later, the same thing: the lid was bulging in the centre. We released the pressure.

Another hour later, another bulging lid, this time as tight as a drum. It’s been going on all day. The yeast has gone into overdrive and we’ve been releasing the pressure every hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes… the gap between each release has been getting shorter. Now it’s late evening, and in an hour I’ll be heading to bed. What then?

We’ve put the fermenter in the kitchen, beside the cat’s bowls, and I have these terrible visions of a scene from a sitcom. He pops down in the middle of the night for some Felix at the very moment when the top blows off. The kitchen, the counters and the cat are showered in a sticky, drippy, dark brown brew, that he gets horribly leglessly drunk licking off himself.

Stagger, stagger, trip up the stairs, jump up on the bed and hurl on the duvet.

So, the question is, do I loosen the lid overnight (and, presumably, until the end of the initial, most disruptive part of the fermentation process) or do I leave it snapped shut and trust the laws of physics and tight lids?

Reading around the net, it would seem that you don’t want real breathable air getting in to mix with the stale environment cooked up by the yeast, which would suggest the lid should stay shut.

But then I also see that some other fermenters have a value in the top, to release the pressure, but keep the outside air out.

Hmmm.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Journal, Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.