Home Brewing a Lager and it's fermenting too fast for the air lock.?!
Answers: I've just brewed up a batch of Lager and put it in a sanitized glass jug with a traditional air lock (lets gas out but no air in). Well it's fermenting so fast that it suds up through the air lock. I re-sanitized the air lock and put it back on. Same thing happened so I just let the suds come up through the air lock. This is been happening for a day until the air lock got clogged with hops and particle matter and popped off like cork on a Champaign bottle. Now I just have a plastic lunch bag over it and suds are coming out all over. Temp is just under 58 degrees F. Any home brewers have any ideas to resolve this issue? I don't want my brew to get contaminated.
If you have an unusually active primary fermentation, you should use a blow-off tube instead of an airlock. Go to the hardware store, and find yourself a length of flexible clear plastic tubing about 3 ft. in length. Make sure it is large enough to fit the inside of the neck of the carboy snugly. Run this tube from the neck of the carboy down to a mason jar (or other receptacle) that is half full of water/sanitizer/vodka.
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Ok you did the right thing by removing the airlock, cleaning and replacing. Continue this, it is unlikeley your brew will become contaminated. In future you should use a vessel with a bigger head space. The other thing you could try is running a plastic tube from your air lock down to a bottle filled with water.
Keep cleaning that airlock. As long as fermentation is coming out and not in, you should be in good shape. You could also use a blow off tube. There is also a route of Fermcap-S drops to nullify the krausen build-up. That would be for future batches, though.
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I'm assuming that this started within a couple of days after you pitched the yeast. If this is, instead, a late development, you may be getting bacterial fermentation. If so, you're SOL. If this is yeast fermentation, you might try cooling down the temperature a bit more. Most lagers can do down a bit below 50 deg. F, safely. That should slow fermentation a bit.
Suggestions for the next batch. Run the primary fermentation in a six and a half gallon bucket. Rack to a carboy after two weeks. If you prefer to use a carboy as your primary, be sure that its capacity is about 6-7 gallons. You can't do a five-gallon batch in a five-gallon carboy. Not neatly, anyway. Blow-off valves take longer to get blown out than airlocks do but they, too, can wind up on the floor.