My thought was that getting rid of some old primary trub would lead to stirring up less gunk while mixing in the priming solution. Thoughts on this line of thought?
Hmm, I'm not sure you understand the bottling process correctly. Either that, or I'm misunderstanding what you're describing.
Normally, the beer ferments in a bucket or carboy. Once it's done, things settle out to the bottom. When you're ready to bottle, you prepare the priming solution (by simply boiling the prescribed amount of sugar in water and letting it cool) and pour it into your (empty) bottling bucket (often with a spigot, but not necessarily). Then, you gently transfer the beer (using a siphon) into the bottling bucket at the bottom. As you do this, the beer swirls around (again, GENTLY; no splashing or bubbles!), mixing with the priming sugar solution.
As you're transferring the beer, you keep the input end of the siphon just an inch or two below the surface of the beer being transferred. This is the clearest part of the beer. The trub, yeast, and sediment are at the bottom of the fermenter, and should not be getting sucked up and transferred. Once you reach the very last bit of beer to transfer, you may pick up a little bit of the yeast/trub at the bottom, but it shouldn't amount to very much.
Once the beer has been transferred to the bottling bucket, you bottle it using the siphon, or a spigot on the bucket (if so equipped).
The way you described it, specifically where you described your concern of "stirring up less gunk while mixing in the priming solution," makes me wonder if you're instead mixing the priming solution right into the beer, in the primary fermenter, and then bottling from there. That would, of course, indeed stir up junk from the bottom, but is not the usual way of priming and bottling beer.
I plan to look up a thread on secondary
LOL, take your pick, you've lots of variety to choose from.
but would appreciate hearing about any experiences y'all may have had with high gravity beers or beers racked to secondary.
I rarely secondary my beers. It's kind of an anachronism in homebrewing, still done mainly out of misunderstanding. There's a myth that it results in clearer beer, but if you think about it scientifically, that doesn't make any sense. Why would a beer be clearer if you disturb it halfway through the process? How could the presence of yeast and trub at the bottom of the fermenter affect whether or not yeast/sediment still in solution precipitate out? Forgive me for quoting myself, but this comes up often and I don't feel like typing it all out again, but this is me from another thread on this topic:
kombat said:
If anything, racking to secondary would be detrimental to clarity.
Think about it. The beer is in primary. During fermentation, everything's swirling around. Fermentation winds down, and there's yeast and trub mixed evenly throughout the beer. Things start falling out of suspension. The stuff at the bottom falls out first, because it has the least distance to travel. The stuff at the top has a long way to fall, so it takes a while. The beer clears from the top down. If left long enough (or sped up with cold crashing), eventually all of that stuff will make its way down to the bottom of the fermenter.
Now, imagine if halfway through, you racked all that beer to another vessel. Now everything that was still in suspension is mixed evenly throughout again. Some of the matter that had already fallen halfway down must now start all over again, falling from the top.
There's no scientific basis for the notion that beer will clear faster if you transfer it halfway through the process. Big breweries do it to a) free up expensive fermenters for the next batch, and b) because of dramatically higher hydrostatic and osmotic pressures on the yeast that accelerate yeast autolysis. Such pressures don't exist on the homebrew scale, so the reasons are inapplicable.
And here are my
valid reasons for employing a secondary vessel:
kombat said:
- You have a limited number of expensive fermenters, and you need to free one up for another batch.
- You want to re-use the yeast, but the beer it's currently in is still conditioning.
- You plan on adding post-fermentation flavourings (fruit, dry hops, wood chips) to the beer, but want to re-use the yeast, so you rack it to secondary to separate the beer from the yeast, so you can re-use the yeast before contaminating it with the flavourings.
- You plan on adding post-fermentation flavourings (fruit, dry hops, wood chips) to the beer, but you're worried about suppressing the flavour infusion if they drop to the bottom and sink into the yeast cake, flavouring the yeast instead of the beer.
- You plan on aging the beer for an extended period of time (2 months+) and are worried about eventual yeast autolysis producing off-flavours in the beer.
