bubbling over and pitching yeast at 2 different times

1. Get a blowoff hose and a bucket of sanitizer/water.

2. You should have pitched all the yeast at once, as your initial packet has now multiplied and will soon have eaten all the available sugar.

The good news is that as long as your temp control is reasonable your beer should be just fine.

 

These are some very basic questions for someone attempting to brew a beer like PtE. You spent a lot of money on hops. I hope it turns out well for you. This is a fairly high gravity beer; you really should have pitched both packets, but it will be okay to wait until the foam dies down. You need a blowoff tube in your fermentor to avoid the airlock issue during big vigorous fermentations. If you don't have one you can try to attach a siphon type tube to the airlock and put the other end in a bucket of water. Then reasemble the airlock when the fermentation dies down.

 

I have you ask, what do you mean by your yeast being active before you pitched it? Now there is no harm in pitching active and possibly non-active (as long as it's healthy) yeast, but we're left to make assumptions on your process.

Normally, 99% of the time you pitch yeast once. The amount of yeast that you pitch (cell count) is determined by a few factors. Any yeast calculator can help you. The cycle that yeast goes through impacts flavor. It's not a tag-team effort.

My first guess to your problem with foam coming out of your fermenter has to do with head space. I fear that it's too full of wort. Not much you can do now, just let us know its and your batch size.

Can you get infections from bubble-overs? You can, let me describe two scenarios. One would be were you have your fermenter in your garage. You open the door often and a lot of dust comes in and coats everything. Then the foam dies and gets sucked back in. The other scenario would be that you're fermenting in a closet with no or little air flow. The foam spews out and hardens. I'm sure that you can see where I'm going here. I'll assume that you're case is more like the last one. If so I'd stop fiddling with the airlock and just take some tin foil and make a tent over top.