It seems the consensus here is that a secondary is not necessary.
But from what I've gathered it also not necessary to leave it in the primary for a month or longer, which seems to be what a lot of people
here advocate. I understand giving the yeast time to "clean up", but if it's done fermenting and you've given it time so you don't taste any off flavors like diacetyl that the yeast will take care of isn't it ready to keg or bottle? Isn't arbitrarily telling a new brewer to let it sit in primary at least x weeks and don't drink any for at least x amount of weeks just as wrong as the rule of 1 week primary, 2 weeks secondary, and 3 weeks in bottle?
I just think because you can leave it the primary for x amount of weeks or months doesn't mean you should.
Well, I don't know where you are getting YOUR information from, but most of us who have been leaving our beer in prmary for a month, would say that you are wrong; that leaving our beer on the yeast for a month has led to a VAST improvement in our beers. In terms of clarity, in terms of clearing up those by products of fermentation, and in terms of an overall crispness to our beers.
We're not ARBITRARILY doing it, we are doing it because
it makes our beers BETTER.
It may be hard for you to grasp, maybe because you are new to brewing and the thought of not having your beer to drink immediately is painful. But it's not some plot by the experienced brewers to torture the newbs by holding their beer back.
We do it because we've found that our beers are better this way. I've started placing in contests, and inevitably my scoresheets have comments from the judges about the visual clarity, and the CLEAN FLAVOR PROFILE of them. And I don't do anything special to my beers, except leave them in primary for a month.
We've already done the arguments against this, we aught flack and arguments like your for the years we have been doing this. And people citing Palmer and Jamil and others as to why this doesn't work, all the while we have been consistently getting great results by doing this.
And finally the folks in the larger brewing community, like Jamil, and Palmer, the podcasts and even the magazines are starting to realize that they passed on "common wisdom" based, I believed on the yeasts of the old days, that was crappy. And now they have to protect their egos and their cred as brewing gurus, so rather than just saying that they may have been wrong they are backpeddling a bit and saying "well maybe it's ok for homebrewers, but the pressures of a commercial vat of beer is different and THAT'S where we got the info from."
I don't know if that's true or not, and I don't care, all I know is that it works for our beers. And that's why we tell the new brewers to hold off awhile. It's not arbitrary, and we're not saying it because we think it just doesn't harm our beer, and therefore it's OK.
NO we advocate it because
IT MAKES BETTER BEER.