help with first brew please, it's escaping!

Hi there all we were lent a barrel with a tap to give home brew a go. We followed the instruction on the label however the full amount of water wouldn't fit and now there's froth coming from the little hole in the screw on cap to the barrel. I'm guessing something is wrong. Any ideas?

Thanks

Thom

For clarification, are you saying you brewed a batch of beer, pitched yeast and put it in this barrel? Is this a wood barrel or a keg "barrel"?

If you brewed a batch and are fermenting in something, the CO2 that is a byproduct of the yeast needs to escape somehow, and it is probably coming through the screw cap. You will need to rig up some kind of airlock or blow off tube. Search either of those key words for more info!

And if you filled it to the top you are going to have big problems - there is also "Krausen" that will need to go somewhere. This is usually a very large foam layer that forms on top of the fermenting beer.

You need a blow off tube, which is a hose attached to your fermenter on one end and the other end goes into a bucket of starsan or sanitized water. I'm not quite sure of your setup but you should be able to rig something. There's a good example of a typical set up in the #9 post of this thread https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/holy-blowoff-395404/

Hi all, we've been given or loaned a plastic barrel with a tap at the bottom. We put all the ingredients into it as per instructions and left it to start fermentation last night. Put the cap on and went to bed, this morning there's foam coming through a little hole in the centre of the cap. Should there be something on the little hole to help venting?

Thanks for advice so far.

Is it a "Mr Beer" barrel?

Hi Dave

No it's a white opaque barrel that's standing on its base.

Hmm. I would take Hogwash's advice. If its filled to the top you are going to be spewing Krausen all over in no time.

Picture?

This is the item we've been loaned.

There's really nothing you can do about it now. Maybe put in in the bathtub or a big plastic container to make cleanup easier. Wait it out. It will stop producing the krausen in a couple days. Then move it somewhere to let it finish for a week or two. It WILL become beer.

Whatever you do, DON'T try to plug the hole to keep the foam from coming out. That can lead to an explosion and an even greater mess.

weirdboy said:

Whatever you do, DON'T try to plug the hole to keep the foam from coming out. That can lead to an explosion and an even greater mess.

Click to expand...

Funny nobody thought of that advice first!!

And don't let any rinsing or wiping action let anything fall back into the hole. The positive pressure keeps contamination from getting in. I assume the hole is big enough for an airlock, get one to stick in there after the stuff stops shooting out. You may want to get 2, so you can swap them out if any shoots up in there. They only cost about $2.

Thank you for all the advice everyone. The hole in the cap it's about the size of a needle I guess. I'm going to put it in the shower later to save cleaning up my kitchen to much.

I would suggest loosening the cap, carefully, to relieve some of the pressure. You can leave it loose for a couple days. Yeast do not like the pressure. In the long run you will want to drill a hole in the cap big enough to fit a grommet and an airlock, or maybe a Local Homebrew Store has an appropriate sized rubber stopper.

Also, when it's done fermenting, I don't recommend opening the tap on that to get the beer out. There's a big nasty looking yeast cake forming at the bottom of that keg that you don't want to drink. Instead you'll want to carefully siphon the beer out into a bottling bucket to which you will have already added 'priming sugar' to carbonate the beer in sealed bottles that you'll likely put them into. Search google or these forums for any of these terms and you'll pick it up quickly.

Seems daunting at first, but really it's just following a few steps and being patient.