Is 5 weeks in primary too long?

I have to travel to China for business in a couple weeks and I would like to get an IPA started fermenting before I leave. But given the things I have going on, it will be 5 weeks before I get back and can get it into the secondary and dry hop it. I'm wondering if that will be too long in the primary or should I just RDWHAHB?

nope.

slipgate said:

nope.

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+1

Most of my beers don't get bottle til 6 weeks or more and they're great. I've left beers in primary 6 months with no ill effects. Folks have gone a year and the beer turned out fine.

The idea of rushing beer off has shifted over the years. There's a ton of info on here about that, I encourage you to read some of the stuff.

5 weeks is no problem at all. I often leave them 6-8 weeks when im busy. Oh and i never secondary. rwdwhahb

Five weeks will be no issue. You can also try dry hopping in primary if you want (one less racking and everything involved there).

Do you bottle or keg? If you keg, you could add the dry hops into the keg just before placing it into the brew fridge/kegorator/keezer. Or let the beer chill down a day and then add it. I use a nylon bag for my whole hops added this way. I find I like it much better than dry hopping and then transferring to keg.

Thanks guys, I figured that it would be cool, but I just wanted someone else to say I would be OK.

+1. I would dry hop when you return. In my experience the hoppiness of an IPA starts to fade after 3-4 months in the bottle.

dnslater said:

+1. I would dry hop when you return. In my experience the hoppiness of an ipa starts to fade after 3-4 months in the bottle.

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+1

10-4 on the dry hop when I get back. That was my plan all along.

Now I just have to survive 3 weeks of Chinese beer! (I would much prefer UK or Germany)

I just kegged a beer that had 13 months primary time.

Camping57 said:

10-4 on the dry hop when I get back. That was my plan all along.

Now I just have to survive 3 weeks of Chinese beer! (I would much prefer UK or Germany)

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Good news, then: most of the beer I had in China last summer (honeymoon) was German-style lager. NE China was German sphere of influence, and picked up the styles in the late 1800s.

That will be interesting then. We are going to be in an industrial part of western Shanghai so I don't know how big the selection will be. At least I enjoy interesting food (best one was when my squid sashimi crawled off my plate in Korea).