Crashed during primary.

[BrewinLou]

Oh boy, I came in today and a valve on one of our FVs opened during primary and crashed it. Now I get to deal with hooking up hot liquor to pump it through the jackets to try and save this batch.

[burcher]

good luck! there's no such thing as a problem free brew day.

[lhall]

Joel,

Had the same problem one time. Be careful warming it up too fast, you can get the yeast that flocc'd in the cone too hot.

You can also try pumping through your HX with it hooked up to the hot liquor tank. We did that and were able to conserve hot water. The beer tasted fine after, but for some reason the yeast did not flocculate out well.

[Ted Briggs]

If you have active yeast in another fermentor I would re-pitch after warming it up.

[BrewinLou]

Thanks for all the replies. It turns out it was extremely close to terminal gravity. It will be transfered to bourbon barrels for seveal months so I think we avoided the bullet. I do have to cut out the old valve. I guess 13 years is good enough for an ASCO/Redhat.

[Scott M]

13 years in constant operation!! That's quite good performance!

Glad you saved the batch!

[HumanFish]

Glad it was OK. Same thing happened to me last year.... valve stuck, pitched at 5pm ay 21C, came back the next morning at 6C.

I tried to work out what to do, and spent a few hours researching. When I came back it was 6.2C and we had one bubble in the trap every minute or so. My logic was that there was something going on in there so I waited.... and waited and waited.

Eventually it got going again and got itself back to about 17C after a few days and reached terminal gravity. Lost a few esters, gained on clarity

[BrewinLou]

I pulled the whole valve apart and it looks like some kind of green calsification on the inside of the shaft the coil slides on to was the problem. The green stuff stopped the slide on the inside from moving.