I’ve never actually made a beer that required a blow-off tube, but I recently received some German hefeweizen yeast from Allen in the Lakeside Brewers’ Guild, which he said would easily clog up a traditional airlock. Because the beer my wife made was still in my plastic primary fermenter, I decided to get really crazy and put this one directly into a carboy. After some logistical errors, spilling some of the wort on the kitchen floor, and a healthy amount of swearing at the cat, I finally got the Dungaree Dunkel in the carboy with Allen’s yeast pitched on top. He was not kidding at all. While I did not get spillage into the water trap, the kräusen definitely hit the blow-off tube, which tells me an airlock would have been a bad idea on this one. Here are a couple of the prettier pictures of the set-up and the kräusen:

Surprisingly, the tea kettle worked out well for a water trap. The lid on the spout made a perfect clamp for the tube that was not too tight to pinch it off, but keeps it firmly in place even with some accidental kicking.

As for the hops, which I have not mentioned in a while, the right side is growing like mad finally, but leftv2 is still a split stem and is not doing much of anything. My third rhizome in the big pink bucket has also neglected to send up any shoots. We have been getting some good rain, so I will snap a few more pictures in the days to come to post my progress.