Time in the primary
 

So, I know I have to give my next brew more time in the primary. Then I noticed at the beer and wine store, their directions say not to leave the wort in the primary bucket for more than 5 days. I am confused, why would they direct people that way. Oh, and the kit I have been using is Festa Brew. Their directions are not as explicit, but still not a lot of time in the primary bucket. http://www.magnotta.com/Festabrew/resources/06FESTA%20HomeBrew.pdf

Can some one let me know what the risk is for leaving this wort in the bucket for longer, as you all have advised that you need almost three weeks in the primary.

No risk at all. I have left them in primary for several months without issues.

There is no risk to leaving the wort/beer in the bucket for three weeks. The people at the store are mistaken. If it were me, I would ask them what their motivation is as it is a rather curious stance.

their motivation is to sell more kits at a faster pace

"my beer tastes like crap"

"you did something wrong, here buy another kit from us"

"but the guys on HBT said to wait 2-3 weeks and most said not to bother with a secondary"

"what do they know? they're not selling you anything"

There's good reason for the confusion. Historically with homebrewing, the process has been modeled around commercial brewing concepts and processes. This has led to some recommended procedures, like short primaries and "necessary" secondaries, that are really geared around production optimization and problems that plague beer only in a large scale. What many of us have realized, through experience, is that those processes can be bent in our relatively small scale brewing. Yet, there are still many people out there who hold on to the traditional concepts. There's nothing "wrong" with these procedures, but it's extra work that, turns out, doesn't really benefit our small scale and therefore isn't worth the effort.

The "concern" with long primaries is that yeast will eventually reach autolysis (or death) and this can cause off flavors if the beer continues to rest on this dead yeast. This is more of a problem when you're dealing with 10 gallons of yeast as opposed to a few cups of yeast. It takes literally months for autolysis to be a problem in small batch brewing. Hope that helps to explain the confusion for you!

Union, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard you say "clear or slightly misty" I'd be rich!:mug:

This is the most asked and discussed topic on here, on a daily basis there are 5 or six treads on this.

This discussion has been thoroughly covered in this thread, it's become the "uber discussion" on this topic.

To Secondary or Not? John Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff Weigh In .

Hahaha. Just thought the same thing. I swear he's got a keyboard shortcut to auto-populate that phrase.

...not that it is bad advice, by any means.

I was joshing him on another thread about that.

but really, it's good advice and he's just hammering it to get the point across