Airlocks Protect Your Beer And Walls When Beer Brewing by Jeff
Airlocks perform a vital role in the beer brewing process. They usually come with your beer brewing starter kit. All fermenters have places on top of them to fit an airlock, and there are a couple different styles of fermenters. But they all serve the same function: keep air out of your beer, while allowing built up CO2 out.
Conversely, you can use a blow off tube, which is nothing more than rubber or vinyl tubing that fits in place of the airlock and serves the same function as an airlock. The other end of the blow off tube is placed into a bucket of sanitized water.
Airlocks allow CO2 to escape, as well as any excess krausen, without spewing out onto your walls, ceiling, floor and anywhere else.
Airlocks come in different shapes and sizes, but have the same basic design: one or more chambers that holds liquid and forms a barrier between your beer and the surrounding air that contains microorganisms you do not want in your beer. Airlocks can have one liquid chamber, or multiple liquid chambers.
When CO2 needs to be released, it travels through the liquid as gas bubbles and is released into the air. The liquid also acts as a barrier to the surrounding air, keeping germs and bacteria (as well as other nasties) out of your beer. A lot of home brewers use water in the airlock, which works perfectly fine for beer brewing.
Some use sanitizer in the liquid chamber, but this doesn’t really add any additional protection. In fact, it can actually work against you. It is possible that the liquid in the airlock can get sucked back into the fermenter, and you do not want to get sanitizer in your beer.
As a compromise, some brewers fill the airlock with vodka. Vodka is sanitary, and if by chance, it gets sucked back into the fermenter, it has a neutral flavor that will not affect the final flavor of your beer, nor cause any negative ill effects otherwise. You would simply just get a little extra alcohol added to your brew.
Liquid getting sucked back into the fermenter is primarily caused by the moving or lifting of flexible plastic such as the plastic used to make fermenting buckets or better bottles. If you are using either one for beer brewing, then you might be better served going with a blow off tube, which can prevent this from happening.
Blowoff tubes are also better options if you have a vigorous fermentation–sometimes pressure can be built up so much that it can blow off an airlock!
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