Without much personal experience (so far) I have to rely on the collective wisdom. So when is it a problem for the beer to sit on the trub?
People have left their beer's in primary for a year or more, and their beer's have turned out fine. I've left beers in primary 6 month or more, and they've been some of the best beer's I've ever made. If your yeast is healthy, and your temps were good, more than likely you're beer is perfectly.
There's HUNDREDS of threads on here where folks have left their beers in primary for a long time, and contrary to what crysond in typical noobish fashion believes, their beer DID NOT taste like soy sauce or dead yeast.
Read this, and you'll see that even John Palmer, who caused the whole autolysis panic among new brewers like you has retracted his views on it....
Nowadays even many instructions, in BYO magazine, and even some kits suggest a long primary as opposed to using a secondary. So it's pretty obviously that they're not buying that bogeyman anymore either.
I suggest you read THIS thread, it's become the "uber discussion" on this topic thread.
To Secondary or Not? John Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff Weigh In .
Autolysis is
not the inevitable end of healthy yeast. It is the unnatural end that is a product of yeast health...like peritinitus or even cancer in us....it is an abberation....UNHEALTHY AND STRESSED yeast autolyse... but rarely do we have unhealthy yeast these days, most of the yeast we pitch is fresh...and unless we are making a huge beer, even underpitching will not NECESSARILY produce stressed out yeast. Or stressed out yeast that will automatically autlolyse....
Most yeast that folks call dead, is actually dormant. Like most of what's in the bottom of the fermenter when fermentation is complete. Or the bottle when bottle conditioning is complete.
And the yeast is indeed dead, a lot of it is canibalized by the living yeast. And the rest, if the yeast was healthy to begin with, is just dead....think of it as natural causes, it's not necessarily spilling it's "intestinal" goop into our beer.
As Palmer and Jamil have said it is a RARE occurance these days that yeast actually dies anymore,
let alone actually autolyses. It just goes dormant when the job is done and waits for the next round of sugar (much like when we pitch on top of the old yeast cake- which even some commercial brewers do for multiple generations.) The cells rarely rupture and die off.
It's not like in the 70's years ago (when most of those opinions that about autolysis originated from) when our hobby was still illegal, and there wasn't a lot of FRESH yeast available to us. The yeast used in hobby brewing was usually in cake form, which came from Germany and England in hot cargo ships and may have sat on a store shelf for a long time....or the brewer just used bread yeast.
Palmer even said this in the broadcast I quote from above-
So the whole health and vitality of yeast was different back then compared to now. Back then it made sense. You had weaker yeast that had finished fermentation that were more susceptible to autolysis and breaking down. Now that is not the case. The bar of homebrewing has risen to where we are able to make beer that has the same robustness as professional beer. We've gotten our techniques and understanding of what makes a good fermentation up to that level, so you don't need to transfer the beer off the yeast to avoid autolysis like we used to recommend.
Yeast in the 21st century is much healthier to begin with, and is less prone to have issues like their cells autolysing....just like our own health tends to be better these days.
Many of us leave our beers a MINIMUM of 1 month before racking or bottling, folks have left their beers in primary for a year or more with no issues. This is not something these days that most brewers (except noobs just stumbling onto Palmer's free book,) worry about.
