Racking and Tertiary Fermentation

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ski36t

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I currently have a Belgian Tripel in the secondary and I have noticed that it was cloudy when I first put it in and after a week now it has become much clearer.

I usually do about a week in the primary before I rack to the secondary. Should I do a tertiary fermentation after most of the yeast has settled out of the secondary?
 
No that is pretty normal. The point of the secondary is for clarification.

Cheers
 
If you wanted it clearer, just leave it in the secondary for longer. The only reason to rack it to tertiary IMO is that you're concerned about picking up too much of the cake from the bottom undoing the clarifying, but I don't think it's worth the contamination risk.
 
omniscientomar said:
The only reason to rack it to tertiary IMO is that you're concerned about picking up too much of the cake from the bottom undoing the clarifying, but I don't think it's worth the contamination risk.
Click to expand...


What about the yeast cake beginning to eat itself and producing off flavors? I read about this somewhere.
 
ski36t said:
What about the yeast cake beginning to eat itself and producing off flavors? I read about this somewhere.
Click to expand...

Racking to secondary pretty much takes care of that. There's not nearly as much yeast in the secondary to produce much off flavors, and even what is in there would take a while to produce them. I've had beer in secondary for over a month without any nasty flavors. At that point you're pretty much conditioning.
 
The only time you really need a tertiary is if you've adding something, like fruit, to the secondary, and want to rack off of that secondary trub/sludge to further clarify the beer. Other than that, you pretty much never need a tertiary. I've heard of people leaving their beers in secondary for multiple months without any problems.
 

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