Dry Hop Volcano!!!!

[shanezilla]

Hey guys, I was reading and was advised by a few brewers on dry hopping techniques. One was to drop the hops into the fermenter with a few degrees of plato to go in the primary and cap off the fermenter and let the beer finish in the fermenter. So I tried this at home. I decided to remove the cap from my little glass carboy, and there was a loud pop and gushing sound right after the rubber stopper was removed, then came the BEER VOLCANO.. The beer had great hop aroma, but 2.5 gallons of beer spewed out of my fermenter. I think I need to use a pressure regulator to dissipate the pressure from the fermenter to keep beer from spewing all over my fermenter. Anyone out there use this form of dry hopping of beers?

[GulfSide]

Do Not Try This At Home

Professional brewers sometimes cap fermentation or spund there tanks. The tanks are stainless steel and rated to 15 psi. Never do this with a glass carboy. You were essentially creating a glass bomb and you could've been seriously injured. It fine to add the hops before fermentation is complete and everyone has there own preferred method of when and how to add them. Just don't do it under pressure unless you are using a pressure rated vessel.

[briangaylor]

Guldside beat me to it - the key difference is that when the pros do it, they are bleeding off pressure before it exceeds the tanks pressure rating. Just plugging up a glass carboy is not a good idea as it could explode on its own or from a minor disturbance (such as you uncapping it). Not sure what the pressure rating of a glass carboy is, but for safetys sake, assume it is 0.

[TGTimm]

Back in the day, we had a glass-carboy fermenter in the basement. Instead of using a trap, we simply had about ten feet of rubber hose attached to the rubber stopper of the carboy. Someone managed to close the beer room door on the hose. One would think that the stopper would just blow out of the fermenter, but, instead, we were treated to a huge explosion that shook the house. On entering the beer room, we found shards of glass embedded deeply into the plywood walls. Had anyone been in the room at the time, I doubt they would have survived.

Carboys are not pressure vessels.

[Bainbridge]

I was expecting the other kind of dryhop volcano. Where someone caps the tank a little early, then a day or two later bleeds off the pressure and climbs up there to dump in the dryhops, only to find that adding zillions of new nucleation points does surprising things to all that entrained co2... Beer/Hop Old Faithful right to the face!

[shanezilla]

Yeah guys I learned my lesson.. I am very thankful it didn't blow up in my face. Wish I had a stainless steel conical to ferment in. But in hind sight it was probably pretty comical to watch me scampering around trying to plug up the blow off that was shooting three to four feet out of my blow off hole..

[jwalts]

You'll have better luck (with the lack of volcano, not the capping of a carboy) if you wait until your fermentation has a few tenths of a degree Plato left instead of a few whole degrees.

Joe

[beerguy1]

I thought it was a rite of passage. JUst got mine 4 weeks ago after brewing for 13 years. What a friggin mess. Plus a motorcycle ride home