Disaster has struck! I had such high hopes for this beer. I did it by the book, but there were never any bubbles. None! No friendly bloops, or even any silly bblbllblbls. It just sat there and did nothing for a whole day! My yeast starter was bubbling away when I pitched it into the beer. But after I pitched it…. nothing!
I checked on Monday morning as I left for work. Nothing!
I checked again Monday after work, and there was still nothing going on in Dad’s Beer Bucket except for one drowned gnat. Here is a photo:
You can’t see the gnat in the photo, but trust me, it’s there.
You can imagine my disappointment with another stalled fermentation. Has this one gone sour too?
But then, I took a look under the blankets to see if I could see anything in the hose. What I found was that the little plug in the piddly little hole had popped out. Something in that beer bucket pushed the plug out of the hole! And if the hole is open, then it makes sense that there would be no bubbles coming out of the Big Hose. All the gas would come out of the piddly little hole in the top of the bucket.
I can only hope that another gnat didn’t find its way into the beer down that hole and drown in the beer.
Then, I picked up the thermometer to see what the temperature was and saw this:
That says 78 degrees! It is only 67 degrees in the room. Something has been going on inside of that fermenter that took the outside of the beer bucket up to 11 degrees above ambient temperature. That happens if there is a strong fermentation going on…. Fermentation is a mildly exothermic reaction. The beer usually heats up under the blankets, but I don’t think I have ever seen it go up that high.
So, maybe there is hope after all. The temperature measurements indicate that a fermentation happened, bubbles or no bubbles.
It is now Friday as I am blogging this, and the temperature has fallen back down to 67 degrees. That would be consistent with a fermentation that has calmed down after a week.
I wonder……
Tomorrow I will tap some of the beer out and see what it tastes like. I hope it is still good. If it is, I will rack it into a secondary fermenter and move forward. We shall see.
Stay tuned.
Isn’t this exciting?