Corkster

Recipes 

Allow me to re-phrase that to "MANY" people then....

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PUNKYBREWER

Recipes 

Ant body have any tips on racking technique.. sorry to ask so many questions but the last thing i need is a bottle grenade.. and some green beer ..to my understanding .. the auto syphon should be 3-4 inches from the bottom of primary.. and let her run till it done.. but i dry hopped in my primary and i am wooried about suckin up scum.. i have many many many postndno one gives and exact and tried true technique to racking..
thanks again to all of you.. i have taken many notes from this forum and thread

MgMt_Home_Brew

Recipes 

If you are holding your auto syphon I would say it is more important to hold the end a couple inches below the top of your beer. Just enough so you don't suck air into the syphon (which I have done before so it's not the end of the world). Then I just lower the syphon as the beer draws out. Then when I start to get to the end I start to tip the fermenter so it all goes to one corner.

I don't remember what kind of beer you are making but unless the beer is black as night you should be able to see in your tubes if you are starting to suck up trub and you will be able to see when you will start to get lots of cloudy beer towards the end. I typcailly get a little when I don't cold crash so that's fine.

Good luck and have fun!

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SmugMug

Recipes 

Hell, I let my autosiphon sit almost on the trub and I only get a minimal amount of it into my bottling bucket (don't use a secondary). That thing is money well spent. I can start the siphon, go feed the kid and come back without worrying too much.

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Revvy

Recipes 

No, I don't agree, I think the consciousness on here has shifted, and if you look at the daily threads on this topic you will see that the number of people opting for the longer primary are huuuge. I think if you did some poking you would be surprised..I think it is now larger than the people on here who are sticking to the 1-2-3 rule or using secondaries.....There's been a huge shift in that over they year and a half where this has been a daily discussion......



I'm not gonna debate this again with you or anyone...like I said if you really care you can go back through ALL the discussions we've had...but I will quote one part of the discussion, to show how thoroughly this HAS been hashed about.





My Response;

I actually think the yeast autolysis might have had merit at one time...several decades ago. Remember back even before 78 the amount of yeast available to hobbyists were very limited, and were usually dry cakes, coming over from places where there wasn't prohibition on homebrewing.

If you've heard some of the interview with the oldtimers on basic brewing, they talk about the yeasts being very old and cakey, and not very good to begin with...

Like Palmer says as long as the yeast is HEALTHY several months on the yeastcake is OK...but back then the yeast may have not been very healthy to begin with. It could have been several months or years old with a very low viability.

And they did notice autloysis in their beers.

And Papazian was writing his book from right around that time period, when yeasts cake in dry cakes and may not have even been stored properly, and many people just placed towels and cookie sheets on their ceramic crock pot fermenters.

So he and his contemporaries influence the knowledgbase back then just like we affect and alter the brewing culture today with these ideas.

This is an ever evolving hobby...Places like this is where you find the most state of the art information/wisdom about brewing, because of the sheer number of us trying new things, hearing new things, and even breaking new ground and contributing to the body of info on the hobby...Look at some of that inventions that came out of here, and then ended up later in BYO articles by our members...

It's just a shift in the culture, it doesn't mean that beer won't be made either way...someday some enterprising brewer from here or using forums as a reference is going to write the NEXT brewing bible, and talk about long primary. and it' gonna be "beery canon" for a number of years, or it will end up as an article in Zymurgy or BYO, and people on places like this will be quoting from that for awhile...then the culture will shift from that idea...

Heck even the last update of Papazian was 7 years ago. Just think of all the technological changes in the last 7 years, and you'll realize that knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum....Just look at this place....the "culture" and ideas shifts over time...like I said, places like this, we, you and me and everyone else here, are the cutting edge of brewing....

Those of us who opt for the long primary usually do it because of what we have read, but mostly because we have noticed an improvement in our beers from other methods.

I joined the long primary camp, precisely because of my contest scores last summer....I kept getting feedback and higher scores for the beers that long primaried....They were described as "jewell like" and "crisp and clean tasting."

As opposed to the beers that I entered using the more traditional means. I mean I had some of the same recipes I brewed that overlapped, like my amber ale, and Dead guy clones, and I could tell that the version 2's of my batches, the longer primary tasted and looked much better....

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MNBugeater

Recipes 

I couldnt disagree more with the "you have to get that beer of the yeast in weeks" school of thought. I accidentally left an Irish Red on a yeast cake for months..5 I believe to be exact. I literally forgot I had this 5 gallon better bottle stuck in a closet I had so much beer fermenting at one time. I didnt have an open keg so I kinda forgot about it.

I kegged it, carbed it, tasted it. Yeah, it was a tad stale I'll admit. But it was very drinkable. It is on tap as I type this. I sent this into NHBC 09 and while the beer didnt score as well as my other beers the judging sheets mentioned this..and I quote.. "I get a very slight hint of autolysis off flavors. Try getting the beer off the yeast just a little bit sooner." I highly doubt by "little bit" the judge meant 3-4 MONTHS!! This beer had other faults that cause the low score but it still scored over 30 after sitting in primary for 5 months. I am not advocating a 5 month rest in the primary on the yeast, I am just giving a big "PSHAW" to the panic associated with getting beer off the yeast as quick as possible and even more to the use of 'secondaries'. I hate that term. I'd love to ban the term secondary from any beginners brewing kit.

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