Secondary fermentation

[peanuts004]

I'm making my first batch and I'm going to keg it and just wondering, should I do secondary in the keg or should I wait until secondary is over and then keg it? Any suggestions ??

 

[raddo14]

Depends on the style of beer, how you want the presentation to be. Where your attenuation is. For my wheats I don't bother rackin into secondary due to the natural cloudiness of wheat. Are you planning to cold crash before kegging?

 

[kh54s10]

I rarely use a secondary at all any more. Recently into kegging and I have gotten more cloudy beers lately, but I think that is most likely because I ran my pipeline low and have finished off my keg quickly.

I think I will have to try cold crashing.

So I would say: 1) leave the beer in primary for a week or two after fermentation ends to allow the beer to clear. 2) I would rack to another vessel to leave what settles behind when you put it in the keg.

 

[peanuts004]

Depends on the style of beer, how you want the presentation to be. Where your attenuation is. For my wheats I don't bother rackin into secondary due to the natural cloudiness of wheat. Are you planning to cold crash before kegging?

I'm sorry raddo14 I'm a rookie and I don't know wht that is (cold crash) I'm making an English pale ale and its been fermenting for 2 weeks now, I'm just following the recipe and today I added natural honey as primary sugar and it started fermenting again, so what do you recommend ?

 

[raddo14]

Depending on your honey ratio, honey is about 90% ferment able sugars with the other 10% being natural pollants and other forms of natural bacteria. I personally have never used honey for primary carbonating or used it at any point after the boil due to me having to pasteurize the honey before putting it in carboys which if not done right could cause off flavors/contamination. I have used honey for my peach ale.

On the "cold crashing" technique is when fermentation is complete and depending on how your carbonating your beer, is to put your carboys or buckets in a temp controlled environment and setting the temp down to almost freezing. As your wort gets colder the sediments and floating substances sink to the bottom due to the weight of the objects. But this is not a technique you would use if bottle carbonating due to ale yeast going dormant after a certain degree.

 

[raddo14]

To recommend what you should do about the 2nd fermentation due to the honey, check your attenuation, do you want to boost your ethanol levels so your abv% will rise? If so let fermentation do its thing. Option # 2 you stop and filter and have sweetness to your beer that's fine. Personally depending on what to do, I would Try the best to hit the guidelines of what type of beer category it is your trying to make.

 

[pjj2ba]

I secondary in the keg. Once fermentation is over, I like to get my beers into a keg.