It is also a good time to do things such as dry hop, add oak chips, or any other aging flavor. Secondary is usually done for around weeks. I've heard that beer can stay in the primary for several weeks, but I continue to rack to a secondary. I usually do it as soon as the head has died down and I'm pretty sure it's not going to flare up again in the carboy. I like to get the beer away from the grungy primary and get the primary cleaned.
I use a plastic pail for primary, and glass carboy for secondary. And I like to do it quite early so that there will be plenty of CO2 still coming out of the beer to force the 02 out of the carboy. I usually let it sit a days or two, and then top it up with water. I often bottle 2 or 3 weeks later. And though I know I probably don't need to use a secondary at all in those cases, I like to do it anyway.
It's party aesthetic. Whilst it might be true, in some cases, it is not true in case of strong stuff, stuff that will stay in fermenter long time.
See wine resources - for yeast wine with nutrient is not so different than wort. And even if this particular part, this one reason is true - racking may be performed to prevent other undesired tastes, including ones that came from badly filtered wort, from leftover hops etc.
I think we may safely assume that experienced and knowledgeable people hardly ever have such problems anymore, so for them it doesn't matter.
At the same time if you still wonder, you might be far from that state. Or not. Brew something simple. Like APA, or other balanced beer. And do it twice, with and without. It is not expensive nor especially time consuming, but it'll let you know what works better with your workshop and your skills. I did this, and I tested it on my friends and myself. Racking to secondary created beer that was received better, and was ready to drink faster.
Does it mean I can't filter properly? I know I can't, or at least couldn't until my last batch! Or maybe I have some other issue? Who knows. But when it comes to beer, no amount of respectability will ever win with taste-buds of my friends , and that's approach I strongly advise to you. If you want to brew real ale , you simply have no option other than to rack. Of course you probably will not rack to actual cask, but cask had inside covered with substance that prevented beer from acquiring wood taste.
But historically, English ales was racked, and kept that way for period of time similar to our "secondary". And it was famous. Of course there are ways far faster than traditional ones, but that's not why we do it, is it? I'd say it's quite the opposite If you add Gelatin or other clearing agents to primary, your yeast are pretty much wasted.
Can't use them to next beer, because you will harm their ability to stay in suspension. And even if you won't, leaving yeast too long in beer that's almost finished may make them dormant. Or dead. So if you are brewing chain of beers to prepare good slurry for barleywine, racking will be the way to go for you. If you use a non-transparent plastic bucket or carboy for your primary, moving it to a transparent plastic or glass carboy allows you to see the clarity of the beer before bottling.
You will be able to bottle your beer when the desired clarity is reached. In most cases, moving to a secondary is purely cosmetic.
After trying both approaches - with secondary and without - I find I get a cleaner and more crisp beer using the glass secondary. So I think if you are doing all the work to make a good batch of beer already - and you are going for the cleanest filtered result, it is worth the additional medium effort it takes to have a secondary as part of the process. In my case , I have four 1-gallon glass jugs for that. So although there are four bottles to fill up and empty, I find it easy to move them around and whatnot.
In contrast to Jeff L, I'd read in CJJ Berry that when brewing wine, it's advisable to rack off fairly early to prevent wine sitting on dead yeast and being contaminated by undesirable flavours. My viewpoint is: 1. Rack to a glass 2ndary after 1 week - assuming you have no active carbonation.
Dry hop in the 2ndary, although it is a pain if you are using dried hops vs pellets :. I used a saison yeast and pitched dry. The tape thermometer on the bucket raised slowly to and held steady ever since. I switched to a three piece air lock yesterday.
This afternoon I'm seeing bubbles only about once a minute. It has been about 90 hours in the primary. Should I give it a full week and then transfer for an additional week in secondary? Or maybe two week in secondary? BTW, my secondery is a clear 5 gal carboy. Do not transfer to secondary at all. Your saison with the Belle Saison yeast, correct? I have shared this experience with many others who agreed and had the same experience.
This yeast is wonderful and starts out fast but needs a long time in primary to finish the job, which will get the beer all the way down to about 1.
So, you say no secondary? I'm definitely not questioning your knowledge or experience but I'm a bit confused as when to use or not use a secdonary.
I'm sorry about the questions but I'm brand new to this and I am a bit confused by all the info out on the web. Will it ruin the beer by going to a secondary? Should I have just used my 5 gal carboy so I could see the fermentation process? In general, it is almost never necessary to use a secondary unless you add more fermentables. When and why would you need to use a secondary fermenter?
First some background — I used to recommend racking a beer to a secondary fermenter. My recommendation was based on the premise that 20 years ago larger higher gravity beers took longer to ferment completely, and that getting the beer off the yeast reduced the risk of yeast autolysis ie. Twenty years ago, a homebrewed beer typically had better flavor, or perhaps less risk of off-flavors, if it was racked off the trub and clarified before bottling.
Today that is not the case. The risk inherent to any beer transfer, whether it is fermenter-to-fermenter or fermenter-to-bottles, is oxidation and staling.
Any oxygen exposure after fermentation will lead to staling, and the more exposure, and the warmer the storage temperature, the faster the beer will go stale. Racking to a secondary fermenter used to be recommended because staling was simply a fact of life — like death and taxes. But the risk of autolysis was real and worth avoiding — like cholera. In other words, you know you are going to die eventually, but death by cholera is worth avoiding.
But then modern medicine appeared, or in our case, better yeast and better yeast-handling information. Suddenly, death by autolysis is rare for a beer because of two factors: the freshness and health of the yeast being pitched has drastically improved, and proper pitching rates are better understood.
The yeast no longer drop dead and burst like Mr. The beer has time to clarify in the primary fermenter without generating off-flavors. With autolysis no longer a concern, staling becomes the main problem.
The shelf life of a beer can be greatly enhanced by avoiding oxygen exposure and storing the beer cold after it has had time to carbonate. At the other extreme are the younger brewers who are more interested in making the most delicious beer they can as efficiently as possible.
In my mind, these are the folks who squeeze in brew days around their work and family schedule, their passion for the craft balanced by other life responsibilities. In actuality, the beer is still going through, or in many cases has already completed, primary fermentation, so the second vessel is actually only serving the purpose of storing the beer.
Secondary fermentation, as I see it, is what occurs when additions are added to a beer that re-start fermentation, such as fruit, simple sugars, and even Brettanomyces or priming sugar added at bottling. As yeast manufacturers started providing healthier yeast cultures, positions on the issue changed among some of the biggest names in homebrew including John Palmer and two of the largest commercial yeast companies, White Labs and Wyeast.
We brew in an age where more and more people are contending that, like the dodo, so too should the secondary go. Yet the conflict remains. To evaluate the differences between 2 beers using the same wort and fermented with same yeast, one left in primary-only while the other was racked to a secondary vessel. As with all of these exBEERiments, the primary intent is to parse out the differences when a single variable is changed, not to belittle people who do things differently than me.
A single 10 gallon batch of the following beer was made and split between 2 carboys post-boil:. I woke up the following morning and got to producing some wort. Once in the boil kettle, the wort was a beautiful hue of red and smelled pretty great.
I gently stirred the wort in the kettle while filling each carboy, mainly so that each fermentor received a similar amount of kettle trub, but also because… well, does it even matter? Fermentation proceeded as usual with both beers becoming active at the same time. The other carboy was just about to do the same when I added a couple drops of Fermcap-S, which stopped the foam in its tracks.
I took a hydrometer sample 1 week in to fermentation, the same time I planned to dry hop these beers. Things were looking equal at this point. Using my sterile siphon starter , I transferred the beer to this new vessel on top of 2 oz of hops. The beers were ready for the keg 11 days after being brewed. I was surprised with the amount of trub at the bottom of the secondary batch.
The full kegs were placed on 30 psi of CO2 in my keezer for 36 hours before being dropped down to 12 psi for serving.
I pulled a couple samples after tossing the first few ounces from each, of course prior to presenting them to tasting panel members. In all, 16 people participated in the tasting panel, all of whom were blind to the nature of the exBEERiment.
Each participant was text messaged a link to the survey, which was adapted to increase objectivity and hence the ease of reporting results. Each beer was assigned the name of an astronaut: primary-only was Neil and secondary was Buzz. Each participant received 2 clean glasses that were filled with approximately 4 oz of each beer. After answering all of the questions blindly, the tasters were informed of the nature of this exBEERiment and asked to guess which of the beers they thought was racked to secondary.
In my experience, these beers are exactly the same. Both beers have a hop haze that will likely remain until the kegs are gone and they definitely taste like the same beer. I purposefully chose to make a dry-hopped beer for this exBEERiment due to the argument that racking on top of hops in a secondary lends the finished beer better hop character.
I found it interesting that a majority of tasters actually thought the secondary batch had more malt aroma, while the primary-only batch was perceived as having a stronger hop nose. Even given the more anecdotal nature of these exBEERiments and the relatively small sample size, these results should at least give pause to those who refute the efficacy of primary-only fermentation.
Another common mis conception is that racking beer from primary to secondary will hasten the clarity process, which simply does not appear to be true… at all. A single taster of 16 total thought the beer racked to a secondary vessel was more clear, while the large majority noticed no difference between the 2 beers.
The fact more people perceived the primary-only beer as being the clearer of the 2 seems to support the notion that clarity is not a function of transferring to a secondary vessel. Finally, a third popular argument for transferring to a secondary fermentor has to do with getting the beer off of the yeast cake in order to prevent autolyzed yeast off-flavors. All designs are available in various colors and sizes on Amazon! If you enjoy this stuff and feel compelled to support Brulosophy.
Being a long time secondary person, I have always viewed it as a way to clear up my beers and to prevent less trub from getting into the keg when going directly from primary.
I just seem to get more drinkable beer when doing a secondary. When you kegged the beers, did you have more drinkable beer with Neil? Also, with Buzz, did you have to waste more beer to get it clear when first pouring? And you are correct. It was very educational.
I got the same exact amount of drinkable beer from both batches, maybe a touch less from Buzz due to the small amount I left in the primary when racking to secondary. A couple things… first, I cold crash for days prior to kegging, which typcially drops a large majority of the particulates out of the beer. Then I always start my siphon from the middle of the carboy and gently lower it as needed, the tip never coming into contact with the yeast cake.
Ah, I see. The secondary drops all that out for me. Sounds like my flaw is in NOT cold crashing. I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how transferring from one vessel to another, without changing temp or anything, would increase clarity at all. The only factor I can think of in my pea-brain that would have an impact is time. Using this style of transfer there is a noticeable difference in clarity of the first half of the keg and less to initially pour off.
I wanna get in on more of these surveys chief! I dry hopped both of these beers pretty heavily and personally can tell no difference. I can never get the trub to some compact state in a reasonable amount of time so that I loose less wort. I relished the idea of ditching the muslin bag to dry hop with; however, the end result was a clogged dip-tube in my corny keg.
How do you dry-hop without a bag and prevent your keg from clogging up with hop sediment? I made 8 batches of lager for beach trip last year 80 gallons , and it was stacked full in the fridge. I bulk aged it in primary, because moving it to secondary was not easily realistic with the 16 buckets.
There was nothing wrong with it at all, no off flavors from yeast, etc. Four years ago, when I started brewing, I followed all of the instructions of my teacher, including racking to secondary.
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