It's Odd Fermentation Time Again...

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Gough

Maintain the Rage!
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G'day all,

I brewed an ag IPA on Saturday just gone - Marris Otter, Target, EKG. 1.061OG, 55IBU. Using the Wyeast 1272 American Ale II yeast 'cause that was what I had in stock, and 'cause I like that yeast. I guess this makes it a Trans-Atlantic IPA :p

Anyway, fermented at 19 degrees in my temp controlled fridge. Everything was going swimmingly and in the normal fashion for this yeast which I have used lots of times before. When I opened my fridge this morning I found the beer suddenly crawling out the airlock.

Now this beer showed no signs whatsoever of doing this for the first 4 days of ferm. It has dropped from 1061 to 1014 in that time(now 5 days). I took a reading 24 hours ago to see how it was going and it had dropped to 1022 by that time so ferm was well toward completion with no sign of blowing the airlock. What would make it suddenly get so active? There has been no change in temp, no extra addition of goodies and in my experience this is unusual for this particular yeast. I smelled and tasted the sample and while the beer is quite bitter (as expected) it is not seemingly infected. My sanitation etc was good and I have only ever had 1 infection in my brewing past and that was a long time ago.

Has anyone else had this happen so late in the ferm? Have I bred a mutant? Not panicking, just surprised/confused. As always any advice gratefully received.

Shawn.
 
Interesting you should ask this Gough as the same thing's happened to me overnight.

I brewed an AG Wit last Sunday and have used cultured Hoegaarden yeast as my bugs of choice. We're now on the 7th day of fermentation and it's filled the airlock overnight. After a couple of days, there was a 3-4 inch krausen but it wasn't getting any bigger. On Thursday afternoon I gave it a swirl to make sure the yeast was suspended well... this caused a lot of the krausen to subside. I noticed yesterday that an even bigger krausen was forming and it's continued to expand.

So it looks like you're not the only one to have experienced this phenomenon.
 
maybe there was a pocket of hidden fermentables rebels that just got crushed by the imperial yeast ... :)
 
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