A couple of questions for future reference

I have the double chocolate oatmeal stout in the primary right now. It smelled terrible a couple days ago ( Like a VERY hot alcohol smell). Lifted the edge of the lid testerday and the chocolate smell is starting to come through. Anyway, as I posted in another thread the trub is way thick ( to me). When I transfer this to secondary , if I put the racking cane down in the trub like normal it will be completely buried. I THINK it was Revvy who said just shove it into the trub and it will form its own channel, but do you do that even with trub this thick and just lose it when you transfer to the bottling bucket? ..Can you believe I forgot the second question....

Wait, so are you asking if you will lose siphon by sucking up some trub?

I doubt it. I always just push it down to the bottom and don't touch it. The first few oz suck up the trub right next to the siphon, then it's clear. I figure a tbsp of yeast slurry in my keg won't kill me, (most of it barfs out in the first pint anyway)...

Is there loose cocoa powder in your fermenter? The reason I ask is I did a chocolate porter recently with 8 oz of cocoa powder and it made a huge trub of cocoa powder on the bottom. I ended up with some in my bottling bucket and in my bottles and they take a long, long time for that cocoa to settle out. If your trub does consist of a lot of cocoa I wouldn't suck any up and try to stay above it. No serious problems come from getting it up while bottling, just cloudy ugly beer. I am going to use cocoa nibs next time to fix this problem.

I'd give the trub an extra couple weeks to compact. I've seen them settle to 1/4 the height they were at when the fermentation finished.

Since you are transferring it to a secondary, don't worry too much about transferring that trub. Yes a little will get through, but you will be leaving 99% of it behind in the primary. What you did transfer over will settle in the secondary and when you move the beer to a bottling bucket it will be really easy to avoid transferring that trub over.

shortyjacobs said:

Wait, so are you asking if you will lose siphon by sucking up some trub?

I doubt it. I always just push it down to the bottom and don't touch it. The first few oz suck up the trub right next to the siphon, then it's clear. I figure a tbsp of yeast slurry in my keg won't kill me, (most of it barfs out in the first pint anyway)...

Click to expand...

no...just wondering about transferring a bunch of trub to the secondary. And then leaving it in secondary when going to the bottling bucket.

david_42 said:

I'd give the trub an extra couple weeks to compact. I've seen them settle to 1/4 the height they were at when the fermentation finished.

Click to expand...

It has a while yet in primary. I hope it compacts down, otherwise I am losing over a gallon of volume!

Since you are transferring to a secondary getting a little bit of the trub at that bottom wont hurt as most if not all of it will settle out before you rack to the bottling bucket.

I believe I saw a post by Revvy that said the trub acts as a filter..BUT, I could be mistaken...