Experiment Number 8

So with the biggest most expensive beer I've made to date I've decided to conduct an experiment. It's really more of a sensible departure from the home brewing norm but I'm not sure if it's going to work so it is a little risky. Most home brewers when brewing a big beer prepare for a violent fermentation with a blow off tube and a bucket. I guess it works ok but it's not the optimal way in my opinion to deal with the large amount of krausen. A blow off tube seems like a perfectly acceptable stop gap measure when foam is erupting from your air lock but not necessarily a calculated brewing methodology.

In anticipation of brewing the Number 8 and after the primary fermentation ejected some of my hard earned beer from of my batch of Brickwarmer, I needed to come up with a solution. I know the monks across the pond would never find losing even a fraction of their beer in to a bucket acceptable. The obvious solution is an increase in head space in the primary fermenter but that's easier said than done. Carboys don't really get any bigger than 6.5 gallons and that's still not big enough for a high gravity mega-beer. There are really quite a few solutions but most of them involve a lot of something I don't have, money, so the fourteen gallon conical fermenter isn't an option.

The affordable solution and experiment as it turns out could be completed with equipment that I have on hand. I have to admit that it's not some kind of revolutionary new idea, in fact I know I'm not the first person to try it. After researching the beer blogs and forums I could see that other brewers have tried this before. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anyone writing about the results of what happened when they tried this idea.

Ok, I'm not going to lie, this is going to get a little weird, two five gallon fermenters. The image shows the Number 8 after about 12 hours in to the fermentation. I can't think of...

As a weird side note I can't seem to keep myself from spelling fermenters like fermentors... isn't that European or something? Weird.

Ok, I can't think of any logical reason why this won't work. As far as the krausen is concerned, it worked fine. I eventually saw about three inches of foam in each fermenter at high krausen which the dual fermenters easily contained. It seems like common sense but there doesn't seem to be much documentation to support it? Why aren't other brewers talking about this? Is it just common knowledge? Even seemingly common knowledge topics seem to be beat to death on the forums. Also because the beer was split in to two fermentors...(see!!!) fermenters it was easier to control the fermentation temperature which was held between 68 and 70 degrees. This seems like a good idea, I guess I'll see in a few months when the beer is completed.