Beer-Mom Moment

So my widdle Wedding IPA is was tucked away in the back of the laundry room and at first I had a regular s-lock on it. I wasn't expecting it to burst into a really active fermentation but as the night wore on I realized there was only a few inches from the bottom of the neck of the carboy to the beer. My first batch was only about 4.5 gallons so there was more room for a krausen to form, but on this batch I was well over 5 gallons. I really need to invest in some 1 gallon jugs for overflow.

Wednesday evening was spent cleaning and pondering what I should do about the airlock system. Just as a precaution I rigged up some large tubing to a regular bubbler airlock and put it aside. My sleep was a series of regularly timed (every hour) bolts out of bed to check on the WIPA. Finally, around 2am I broke down and mixed up sanitizing solution and replaced the S-lock with this lovely contraption you see here. I know that if I hadn't I would have been looking at a huge mess and considering how closely packed the laundry room is, cleaning up sticky wort would have been an impossible task.

I've changed out the sanitizer because it starts to look gross and sadly I know that it is lost beer. I'm confident that it should ferment out in 7-9 days though I might let it go for a full 10. I plan on dry hopping it for 2 weeks and and oaking it for about a week. The recipe calls for oak, which completely blew me away. I didn't know that IPA's could be oaked. I had to decide on boiling the extra 1oz of Willamette I had in the fridge or dry hopping it. I went for dry hopping because I definitely wanted something that when it poured it would waft up and over your nose.