trucker5774 wrote:Graham seems to have the answer............Not EVERYTHING is the same. The FV is a huge difference in the same way that bulk conditioning is. My beer may well be even better if I was to sit on it for a while. I'm just not willing to have that much kit to have a load of barrels around. Bottles are fine but different in taste and carbonation. I tend to just have a couple of barrels and one or two brews in bottles.
The thing is that most packaged yeasts seem to lose their top-working characteristics and do not seem to have the vigour that I would expect, thus many home brewers are surprised when they obtain some live brewers' yeast and find it goes like the clappers and tries to crawl out of the bin. On occasions there are questions on here, along with a photo of a perfectly good yeast, asking if something is wrong with the brew, because they had not seen anything like it before. Home brewers seem to have got used to bottom workers and regard it as the norm.
I happen to think that top-workers best suit home brewed British ales and beers; our equipment is similar to that of old-time breweries and similar to that of the surviving long-established regional brewers. In my view top workers are easier to separate from the beer. Some types of top-working yeast do need rousing, at least once, and in some cases, as in Yorkshire yeast and Ringwood yeast, more than once during the period of fermentation. Yorkshire brewers liked their yeast, even though it demanded so much attention, because once they stopped rousing, it stopped fermenting (or at least slowed dramatically). This gave them the ability to control the gravity at which they racked their beer and enabled them to produce relatively weak beers that drank "full" for their gravity. Sometimes our shallow, eighteen-inch deep vessels work to our advantage, inasmuch as we can often get away without the need to rouse, whereas a commercial brewery using the same yeast would have to rouse. With other strains it can take longer to ferment in our shallow vessels than a commercial brewer would experience in his or her six-foot+ deep vessels.
Nevertheless, anything longer than 5-days to reach somewhere close to 'predicted' final gravity would be unusual, for me at least, but not a disaster. I am also somewhat bemused at the common practice of leaving the beer for days on end in a bin, so-called 'secondary'. As far as I am concerned, any 'secondary' should be done in a sealed cask, so that CO2 is building up naturally. When the cask is vented, prior to consumption or bottling, the nasty volatiles of fermentation are purged out of the beer by the release of CO2.
Almost any beer will benefit from an extended period of maturation, even Crouch Vale beer, but these days people are getting used to what would be regarded in the past as 'green' beer being served up in the pubs. Also, home brewing, courtesy of the disinformation highway, is moving far away from best practice. Many of the short-cuts frequently advocated, and often spouted with a certain degree of pride as if it is somehow makes the advocate cleverer than the rest of us, only causes problems further down line; time to drinkability being one of them; 'orrible beer being another. If people are going to trap those nasty volatiles in the beer, by bottling straight from the fermentation vessel, or transferring to a Cornelius keg (which is just a big bottle) and immediately slapping a ton of pressure on it, then so be it. I suppose people can get used to anything.
I don't just mean clarirty either as, like Trucker, I drink with my tastebuds not my eyes. Don't get me wrong it is a great pint when it is ready but I would love to be able to emulate commercial time frames when needed.
On my next brew I shall rouse the yeast daily and see how much it speeds up femenation.
