At this point if you dip a sterilized teaspoon in to the liquid and taste it, it should be slightly sweet which is great.

We are going to make a Yeast Starter, Using a sterilized jug half fill it with liquid from the fermenter, let it cool to the working temperature of your yeast, which should be between 18 - 25 degrees C but check your yeast for its working temps. if you are going to use bakers yeast then a temp of about 22 degrees C should be good enough.

You should also be allowing your fermenter to cool to the same temp at this point as well, it will cool slower than the jug because of the volume.

stir your yeast in to the jug and let it sit until the fermenter has reached the working temp of the yeast, then pour it in and give it a good stir, try and get some air in there with it if you can this will help the yeast get going before it gets in the main fermenter and should speed things up a little.

At the start of the instructable I mentioned I made a mistake, and it was at this point I made it, normally i fill a fermenter up to about 2 inches from the top. this is not normally a problem for a sugar wash, and you can sometimes get away with it on an All grain as well. Now I am not sure if it was the fact that i was using an ale yeast or that I over filled the fermenter but at this point I popped the lid on, with an airlock in it, and went to bed. woke up the next day and the airlock is bubbling nicely, it takes a little while to get going. So I left it and went out for the day, I come back about 8 hours later and the fermenter has exploded. What happened was a foam or cap had formed on the top, which is normal, and this got sucked/pushed up in to the airlock which is called puking, this blocked the airlock. Pressure built up and the lid popped open spilling a foamy mix of potatoes all over the work area and all over my air-con unit. I was too busy cleaning it up to take a lot of pictures but I have some of the cap and a little of the mess from half way through cleaning it up. DO NOT PUT THIS BACK IN THE FERMENTER if this happens to you. You risk infecting the stuff in the fermenter.

I then had to split the the wash/mash in to 2 fermenters with airlocks to avoid this happening again.

if you have a big fermenter and there is a lot of room at the top you wont have to split it, if you are using a 25L fermenter like mine then I would advise you split it in to 2 fermenters.

this mistake cost me about 2L or more of the wash which now wont become vodka :-(

I was using an ale yeast, ale has a lot of foam on it, and the yeast produces that foam, i suspect that if I had used another yeast such as a wine yeast EC-1118 or bakers yeast then it may not have been too much a problem. But if you are going to try this your self I would split it away to be safe.

Note on bakers yeast

if you are using a bakers yeast you may get some strange odors coming from the airlock, I have had some bakers yeasts smell like rotting eggs. this does not mean your mash or wash has gone bad this just means the yeast is producing sulphides which stink. keep a note of that yeast and don't use it again.