marcucci

Recipes 

Sorry if this is covered I am sitting with my poor beer and wanted to post from my phone.

I banged my secondary into my primary and the whole yeast cake dispersed into my beer. I was trying to get it moved as it had been in the primary for three weeks and I won't get to bottle for a week at least.

I racked anyway but it is really cloudy and there was little or no cake left in the primary after I was done. So how will this affect my beer? What should I do next?

Thanks for the help!!!

kgraber

Recipes 

Did you rack to secondary or to bottles? If secondary just let the yeast settle out again before bottle.

Golddiggie

Recipes 

Do next? Not rack off of the yeast for ales until it's going into the bottling bucket... An extra week on the yeast will do a brew good 95% of the time.

Letting a brew sit on the yeast for 2-4+ weeks won't do any harm. If anything it will help the majority of brew. Sure, there are a few styles that you want to rack to do different things with, but those are the minority. Basically, anything using ale yeast can stay on the yeast for at least 2-4 weeks.

There's tons of posts about this here, start looking through them...

If you were just racking to get the brew to clear, you would have been better off leaving it on the yeast. Now, since you disturbed it, you'll need to let it all settle again, before racking into the bottling bucket...

Racking, for the vast majority of brews, is a carry over from the dark days of home brewing. Back when ingredients weren't so good, yeast wasn't nearly as good, and such. With today's ingredients, and yeasts, it's no longer necessary... There are more than a few people on these boards that have had beer sit on the yeast cake for 4+ months before racking to bottle...

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marcucci

Recipes 

Thanks. I've read a bunch of posts about leaving ales in the primary and skipping the secondary, and that is how I did my last batch. (I'm only on batch 2.) I got the feeling that 4 weeks was the max "safe" time in the primary and that secondary's were used for 4+ weeks. Since. I wasn't sure I could bottle next week I thought racking was a good choice. I guess next time I'll wait longer.

Thanks for the advice though. I'll let it sit till it clears again then bottle.