Experimenting and best practices

[Flyinghutch]

Hey Guys!

Long time lurker, first time poster, and future contributor here!

I have a batch of End of the trail ale (american stout) in the fermenter right now. it's been about a week and In a few more days I think I'll be close to taking my first gravity readings to see where we are at.

My question is about experimentation with portions of my future tasty beer. What I was considering was racking off a gallon into another carboy to mess around with some peppers. Kind of see if I can make something like the Clown Shoes Chocolate Sombrero.

Now I don't want to commit all five gallons to this experiment, so I'm curious what the approved practice is here.

The way I see it I have a few options:

1- Rack off one gallon and leave the rest in the primary fermenter until bottling time. My concern now would be too much headspace in the primary late in the process.

2- Rack off one gallon and the rack the rest into a 5 gallon carboy. That still gives me a lot of headspace but not as much as before.

3- Rack off two 1 gallon carboys and one 3 gallon carboy so everything is nice and tight up to the neck. This one is a lot of cleaning and sterilizing and increases my chances of screwing SOMETHING up quite a bit.

4- Just leave it alone and drink my beer!

Any opinions?

Thanks guys!!

-hutch

 

[gr8shandini]

I'm going to vote for Plan E - let it sit another week, then rack off whatever you want to experiment with and bottle the rest. Why dick with your main brew when you only have another week until it's ready to package?

 

[Flyinghutch]

Didn't think of that one! That sounds better than anything else I came up with. Why risk screwing up everything to try doing something that very well could suck!

-hutch