Open Fermentation

[pmanz]

I read in the Wheat beer classic beers styles guide book that some research has suggested that hefe-weizens may benefit from open fermentation. I was thinking about trying this myself.

Does anybody have any experience in this on a home brewing level. Some of the stuff I have heard suggests that you need a big pitch for a short lag phase and a pretty "vi-garose" fermentation to keep this from going wrong...

thoughts...?

[Mylo]

Yep... Don't do it...

Unless of course, you have a clean room - like Jamil...


Mylo

[pmanz]

Weeeeeeeeell...

I can make a clean fridge.

I usually clean (and if necessary sanitize) my fermentation fridge before every batch anyhow. I was planning on racking the wort into a carboy clean my boil kettle and then rack it back into the kettle to ferment in the fridge. From what I have read so far, as long as you don't have animal life crawling around you fermentation area it can be done, and may result in better beer.

Part of why I'm interested in this is that when I do my hef's with 3068, it's usually a rather messy ordeal. I have had a blow off tube blow itself off a few times and I'd rather eventually fabricate an open fermenter that allows me to skim off and toss the hop drive and then harvest the best yeast from the top

Most of what I am drawing from can be found in this link, IMHO it's very interesting...

http://hbd.org/brewery/library/OpenFerm.html

[Mylo]

Interesting article! The author does not suggest anything as "open" I as would have thought - and that's probably for the best. He's really only "cracking the lid" during heavy fermentation - and keeping it covered for the rest of the time. Yeast harvesting is definitely a bonus. Let us know how it goes - and what you did to mitigate the risk of infection.


Mylo

[Eagle Creek Brewer]

I would at least cover it lightly with foil, just to keep the little bugs from falling in.

Barry

[BadRock]

There is a great article in this issue of BYO including plans.

http://brewyourownstore.com/julyaugust06.html

[pmanz]

Well I did it.

I currently have about 7.5 gallons of a dunkle weizen fermenting away in the basement. I'm taking pictures and need to know how to post them. It's completely open sitting on a pillar of concrete blocks at 4 blocks high. No legged critters can get into it and from what I've ready anything that can fly won't land in it bc it would be overcome by the CO2 coming off. We'll see.

I pitched approx 200ml of super thick, creamy white 3068 yeast (i'm talking sludge) that I grew up on a stir plate for about 2 weeks.

After about 12 hours I noticed the "hop drive" and new colonies forming on the surface. I sanitized my wife's wire sieve from the kitchen in some Idophor and pulled all of it off. Right now I'm about 36 hours into it and have almost 5 inches of krausen on top. I plan on harvesting the yeast tonight.

I'll post more details later as they come.

[bub]

Nice!
Host them on photobucket, or picassa, or whatever, and send us the link, or you can post url's to the exact photos to view here.
BUB