Using the primary as the secondary?

Hello fellow brewers,
I have an Irish dry stout in my fermentor that i brewed up this weekend and this will be my first batch that should be racked into a secondary but, the kicker here is, I dont have a secondary and seeing as how my beer budget ran out a little early this month, can I just rack the batch into my bottling bucket and then clean the trub out sanitize and rack it back in the primary and get the same effect? I know that it is an inffectiuon risk. I would like to think it would work, but i would like any input from you more experienced brewers(or anybody really) on my round about ways. Thank you for the replys

just leave it in the primary for the full time. thats what a lot of people here (and me) are doing now. i wouldn't risk transfering it twice.

The risk you run is oxidation, as the head space in a bucket is huge and if you cannot purge a bucket with CO2, all you will be doing is aerating your beer and leaving a large surface area to air.

Since it is a stout, leave it on the yeast for another week, then bottle. No secondary.

A secondary is not a requirement but what you have in mind will work just fine. Keep up your sanitation efforts but don't worry too much. Your beer is already alcoholic enough to be able to protect itself from most infections.

Thanks for the feed back I will leave it in the primary for the duration.

Unless you are dry hopping or adding fruit I would just leave it in primary. But theoretically the process of cleaning your primary would work if you ever really want to use a secondary.

RitsiGators said:

Unless you are dry hopping or adding fruit I would just leave it in primary.

Click to expand...

This advice is repeated often. Why is that? Specifically, would it be wrong to add fruit to the primary (let's say in the second week of four in the primary). Same with dry hopping: can this be in a long primary?

You can dry hop in the primary, just make sure the fermentation is complete or you will lose the effectiveness.

You are not going to be able to wash/rinse the yeast and save for future use if your dry hop the primary. That is the major con I see.

plus if you are using pellets and just put them in the primary/secondary they can get lost in the yeast/trub. As for fruit you could restart fermentation and it could get pretty messy unless you build in extra headspace to start with.