Beer Forum

We are in a summer training class where we have to identify a problem, brainstorm solutions and then prototype and present our "product". We chose something we would enjoy working on, brewing beer. We are thinking of rapid fermentation clogging the airlock and causing an explosion / causing sanitation issues. We need to show there is a need for a solution and a survey is easiest to grab data with. If you could help us out, it's anonymous and only two questions.

Any help is appreciated and thanks in advance!

https://goo.gl/forms/weVl213bboZ6W7Kq1

That was pretty simple, but you're not going to get a lot of insight using it.

In the early days of dried yeast I used airlocks from the get-go. When I switched to liquid yeast I started having issues. One DIPA I made threatened to blow the lids off the fermentors because krausen clogged the airlocks. I had to drop the temp in the fermentation chamber to the low 50 degree range before I could get it under control. After that I started using blowout tubes in the primary.

My blowout tubes are 3/8 ID Tygon tubing mated to the fermentor's grommet with a 1 inch piece of thin wall stainless tubing. But I have occasionally had issues with that setup. My 2L yeast starter (usually WLP-001) is grown from a 500 ml primary culture a couple of days before brewing, and the yeast are going jessies! I usually get activity through the airlock within 3 hours of pitching. The problem is that with a brew in the 1.080 range the tubing is not large enough to easily pass the volume of CO2 and krausen being generated. Obviously, the solution is to go with larger ID tubing, but I haven't done that yet.

In the production brewery we used 1 inch stainless tubing for blowout with our 60 bbl fermentors, and that worked pretty well. I don't recall any overpressure issues (even the one time we forgot to open the glycol valve).

Charlie

Thanks for taking it. The class is for Engineering Design and Development training. We aren't supposed to solve the problem initially. The survey is just to show there is a need for a solution then we work through talking with experts in the field, brainstorm, come up with a lot of possible solutions, use a weighted matrix to decide which solution to develop,... and a whole lot more. Look up Deep Dive on YouTube, the one with Ted Koppel, really interesting video.