People have successfully left their beers in primary for up to 6 months without any sign of autolysis. That's one of the reasons it's been pretty much disproved as nothing but a bogeyman to the homebrewer.

New brewers tend to be too busy cleaning up from crapping their pants after reading palmers section on it in HTB to actually notice his final comments on the subject


Even when Palmer is talking about it, he's talking about it in terms of LAGERS not ales. Most people get so freaked out about in reading Palmer, that they don't notice it is in the Lager chapter, nor do they notice the caveat at the end of the section that I posted above.

I still believe that POSSIBLY autolysis WAS a concern to homebrewers 20-30 years ago, when the yeast came in dry cakes, of dubious heritage and came across from where homebrewing was legalized in the hot cargo holds of ships and may have sat for months in terrible conditioned...In other words was unhealthy to begin with.

And therefore may have crapped out and made for nastiness, (and also was prone to stick fermentation as well.) and tales of it just continued to perpetuate over time, even though yeasts are much more healthy and fresh, and more is understood about them nowaday....people gravitate to the negative and fear and still perpetuate those worries...over and over and over....

And I still maintain that as much as I like Palmer, he contributed to the hysteria.....I mean noone but me seems to notice that that section on the scary autolysis appears in the chapter on lagering. He is not talking about it with ales...or beers in general..just lagers..because flaws are more perceptable in lagers...since in essence most commercial lagers are tasteless...anything would stand out..

So really, you have little to worry about in terms of autloysis, especially in those timeframes you are asking about.

DO you think we'd repeatedly leaving our beers in primary for a month, if it were really an issue? Don't you think we'd be saying move your beer, rather than saying that we have found our beers actually better being left in an extended primary in contact with the yeast?