Racking to Secondary

How do I know when it's time to rack to a secondary fermenter? It's been five days and the heavy fermenting is over but there's still small bubbles rising.

Many don't bother to secondary. Let the beer sit a couple of weeks. Checking the gravity of the beer and having the same reading for 3 days in a row will let you know that the beer is done fermenting. If your want to secondary, wait til it's done fermenting completely.

Why do you need to rack to secondary is the question. Many here have found that racking to secondary is just not necessary, although it used to be the way every one did things. Secondary is now usually only used for dry hopping, fruit additions or similar things. IThat being said some still do rack to secondary, and to each their own. I would say if you arent doing any of those you could just leave it in primary for 3-4 weeks and then bottle, depending on where your specific gravity is. What type of brew is it your making?

Hammy beat me to it....

First ask if it necessary. Are you adding any adjuncts, dry-hopping or aging longer than a month? If not then I would just leave it in primary for a month. If you are, then transferring is really based on preference or the beer style. Some people do it at 5 days, others do it much later. I tend to wait until the fermentation is complete and has reached F.G. before transferring. This is usually 2 to 4 weeks. Edit: and mostly because I'm not in a hurry.

I'm not adding anything else and the beer is an American Cream Ale. In the Brewers Best instructions they recommend racking to a secondary after 5-7 days to improve flavor and clarity. But after reading more I think it may be uneccessary.

xon432246 said:

I'm not adding anything else and the beer is an American Cream Ale. In the Brewers Best instructions they recommend racking to a secondary after 5-7 days to improve flavor and clarity. But after reading more I think it may be uneccessary.

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Yep, like I said above everyone used to think that you had to get the beer off the yeast cake to prevent off flavors. This has been proven to not be the case and quite the contrary actually. Leaving the beer in primary will give the yeast some time to clean up their mess and will leave you with excellent beer. There is lots of info regarding this subject on this forum. Leave it in primary if your not adding anything and take that extra time to do a bunch of reading here about anything and everything related to brewing.

I find that if you keg your beer, i prefer to use a secondary as that helps to clear things up a little more so when you siphon to the keg, there is less settlement at the bottom as it sits there over the next few months. Thus, less crap in your glass.

As a personal preference, instead of transferring to secondary I will refrigerate my carboy for a few days before bottling or kegging. This is called cold crashing. It will drop yeast out of suspension and will help solidify the yeast cake so you can rack more beer to your keg or bottling bucket.

This helps quite a bit with clearing up the beer.

You can also add gelatin after fermentation is over. I've never done this but I know a bunch of people on the thread do it.

Cream ales often promote clarity and a cleaner flavor by fermenting at lower temps. It's not necessary to use a secondary, as I've done cream ales without a secondary, but it is possible (likely even) you will have a cleaner taste and better clarity if you do transfer. Just know you run the risk of contamination by doing this, thus possibly compromising both flavor and clarity.