Day three, and my first batch of beer is still fermenting like crazy. One the yeast gets going, there’s no stopping it until it eats up all the malt sugar, converting it into alcohol and carbon dioxide so enthusiastically that they thrash up a big head of foam.

I pour the beer into a giant glass bottle called a carboy to let it ferment, and so much foam builds up at the top of the carboy that it comes spooging out the top, so I stick an inch-thick plastic tube down the neck of the carboy and leave the other end in a one-liter beer stein I picked up at the end of a volksmarch I went to in Germany.

Sunday morning, that stein was overflowing with foam, so I rinsed it out. Last night after I got home there was still foam in the stein, but not nearly as much, and none in the tube. That meant it was probably time to pull the tube out and replace it with a vapor lock, a little gizmo that will let gas out of the fermenter but not let any air in.

Well, I jumped the gun just a bit there. When I checked the batch this morning, a big head of foam was gushing from the vapor lock. Had to rinse it out and clean up a big mess on the countertop.

I hope it’s really done now, but after seeing that fermentation is still at a rolling boil, there could be at least one more gooey mess in the future.