fermentation
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carlo fabb
fermentation
Hi im a beginner brewer and hoping someone can help me with a question regarding fermentation. I bought a mashkit and the instruction said to ferment in a primary vessel for 3 days. Then rack into a closed secondary fermenter fitted with an airlock. My question is do I have to keep the lid off of the primary vessel? I have a conical fermenter do i still have to change from one vessel to another? Thanks in advance
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Rogermort
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Re: fermentation
Lid (and airlock) on both.
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Kev888
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Re: fermentation
Most beginners (and in fact most very experienced homebrewers) would just have flat-bottomed fermenters, the racking instructions are for those. Conical fermenters are designed to avoid the need for this by dumping sediment out of the bottom rather than taking the beer off the top of it. There are a few reasons for racking, or in your case dumping; as best practice some people do some or all of them, others don't bother to do any and still make decent beer so generally speaking its not hugely critical:
Firstly, after around a day you can dump any cold break and trub that ended up in the fermenter and gradually settled over the first several hours or so - depending on how you filter and cool the hot wort you may have more or less of this. Before conical fermenters were introduced many breweries would rack (partly) for this reason with what they called the dropping (or double dropping) method. Most homebrewers don't bother with this as for most the effects aren't noticed or even accepted, but its easy to do with a conical.
After fermentation there is a lot of settled yeast. Leaving the beer on this for too long, especially if warm, can cause off flavours from autolysis. Traditionally many homebrewers did rack to secondary fermenters at this stage, though with modern yeast and temperature control its less necessary and many don't now bother unless they intend to leave the beer in the fermenter for many weeks. Though the effects and urgency may have been greatly exaggerated in the past, it is not entirely a myth and with a conical dumping is easy so may as well be done.
Some people would later rack to avoid stirring up sediment if adding finings, and/or transfer to a clean bucket temporarily for bottling without risk of sucking up sediment (in which they may also bulk prime). Again you can simply dump sediment from the conical instead, should you wish to use finings or before bottling/kegging.
In between those times you may wish to harvest yeast slurry for use in the next brew. Though this isn't something to be done without good understanding, since selection of healthy cells and avoidance of infection are very important. But FWIW, users of flat fermenters would normally wait until the beer is racked to get at the slurry, but conicals allow you to be a bit more selective. Its normal to dump out the initial yeast sediment and discard; it will likely contain some trub, dead and unhealthy cells that gave up early. Then a few days later draw off and store some healthy slurry. Yeast from the tail end is also usually discarded, it may contain cells which were uncharacteristically reluctant to flocculate and settle.
Depending on your conical, you may find that even if you didn't want to harvest slurry it may be worthwhile dumping it periodically rather than waiting until kegging/bottling. If left too long it can become more compacted and too stubborn to dump when you try.
Leaving the lid on is normally safest IMO. It can be okay to have the lid off when/whilst there is a substantial krausen in place, but unless there is a reason (and certainly until you are more experienced) I would suggest trying to avoid that. You don't need to be paranoid about it, but keeping flies, dust and spores from falling in is worthwhile to avoid infection. In one extreme case a chap had his cat fall in
Firstly, after around a day you can dump any cold break and trub that ended up in the fermenter and gradually settled over the first several hours or so - depending on how you filter and cool the hot wort you may have more or less of this. Before conical fermenters were introduced many breweries would rack (partly) for this reason with what they called the dropping (or double dropping) method. Most homebrewers don't bother with this as for most the effects aren't noticed or even accepted, but its easy to do with a conical.
After fermentation there is a lot of settled yeast. Leaving the beer on this for too long, especially if warm, can cause off flavours from autolysis. Traditionally many homebrewers did rack to secondary fermenters at this stage, though with modern yeast and temperature control its less necessary and many don't now bother unless they intend to leave the beer in the fermenter for many weeks. Though the effects and urgency may have been greatly exaggerated in the past, it is not entirely a myth and with a conical dumping is easy so may as well be done.
Some people would later rack to avoid stirring up sediment if adding finings, and/or transfer to a clean bucket temporarily for bottling without risk of sucking up sediment (in which they may also bulk prime). Again you can simply dump sediment from the conical instead, should you wish to use finings or before bottling/kegging.
In between those times you may wish to harvest yeast slurry for use in the next brew. Though this isn't something to be done without good understanding, since selection of healthy cells and avoidance of infection are very important. But FWIW, users of flat fermenters would normally wait until the beer is racked to get at the slurry, but conicals allow you to be a bit more selective. Its normal to dump out the initial yeast sediment and discard; it will likely contain some trub, dead and unhealthy cells that gave up early. Then a few days later draw off and store some healthy slurry. Yeast from the tail end is also usually discarded, it may contain cells which were uncharacteristically reluctant to flocculate and settle.
Depending on your conical, you may find that even if you didn't want to harvest slurry it may be worthwhile dumping it periodically rather than waiting until kegging/bottling. If left too long it can become more compacted and too stubborn to dump when you try.
Leaving the lid on is normally safest IMO. It can be okay to have the lid off when/whilst there is a substantial krausen in place, but unless there is a reason (and certainly until you are more experienced) I would suggest trying to avoid that. You don't need to be paranoid about it, but keeping flies, dust and spores from falling in is worthwhile to avoid infection. In one extreme case a chap had his cat fall in
Kev