IBA Explosion!!!

Came up with some special steps in brewing my Northern LIghts Organic India Black Ale, version 2 . . . maybe too special. The original gravity came to 1.070 after a 90 minute boil, with 99 IBU by my calculations using The Beer Recipator. These high gravity results seemed great, until I got home from work this afternoon and discovered the airlock filled with foam and a steady stream of CO2 off-gassing through the top. A small wet spot on the ceiling of my insulated fermentation chamber should have given me a hint that there was pressure building, but I wasn't quite prepared for what was to come moments later.

Airlock atop 6 1/2 gallon carboy moments before  "the event".

I have not seen such a vigorous fermentation so far in my brewing career, so I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to get a clean airlock loaded up with vodka and just replace the one that was having difficulties. With my two children watching from behind me, I pried off the airlock. Bad idea, unless you wrap the whole works with a towel. I got a nasty blast of sour chocolate yeast foam full in the face, in my hair, across my glasses, over my hands, and in a blast radius covering the inside walls and top of the chamber.

The mess was pretty easy to mop up, but my wife says our mud room now smells like, "a dive bar where generations of old drunks have puked up beer and only been partially cleaned up after."

The new airlock filled with foam almost immediately and threatened to blow again. So I yanked it out and draped the opening with plastic wrap while I figured out how to build a blow-off tube and sanitized reservoir from available materials. I feel like I'm reenacting that scene with the mission control engineers from 'Apollo 13', "Houston, we have a problem!"

I cut the hole too big on my first try, but got a snug (and hopefully airtight) seal by slicing through an airlock and  threading through some spare reinforced hose from my sparging setup.

The fermenter's temperature had also reached 73 ºF, so I packed the chamber with ice packs and began to bring things back to a reasonable range.

My handy Erlenmeyer Flask with a Chlorine Bleach solution set up to collect run off from the blow-off tube.

John Palmer suggests you use at lest a 1" diameter blow-off tube to reduce the chance of a clog and further eruptions, but 1/2" is all I have on hand. It now sounds like there is something alive in my fermenting cabinet. A near constant, but thoroughly unpredictable rhythm of boisterous yeast-breathing bubbles.