Very rapid ferment - should I just bottle it now or age it in secondary?

[Gothnet]

Hi there,

I'm sort-of a beginner, I've been doing AG for about a year now and this is brew number 6. Seemed this sub-forum was as good a place as any to ask my question - should I age or just bottle this beast?

It's a maple-oatmeal-stout (recipe for reference and in case anyone else wants to give it a go) -

5kg Maris Otter
1.5kg rolled oats
500g roast barley
300g black malt
300g crystal malt
1 litre Dark-Amber Canadian maple syrup

40g Northdown, 40g EKg at 60 minutes
20g Northdown, 20g EKG at 20 minutes

Mashed at 68.5C and made a 26 litre batch. Heat-exchanger for rapid wort cooling/cold break and then into a temp-controlled fridge at 18C (64F) to ferment. I used two packets of Nottingham yeast to give it a real good start.
My efficiency was very low, coming out at only 1.061 (temp adjusted), for about 55%, I may have calculated the syrup wrong...

Anyway, it went hell for leather. Overnight Sunday it spat out a good pint of sticky brown liquid which was a nice cleaning job Monday evening, and it was still foaming and making growling noises. Replaced and refilled the airlock on Tuesday and there was little activity after that. Today I've brought it into the house in anticipation of putting it into a glass secondary for the next two weeks. It was supposed to stop at around 1.017 according to software I use (Beer Engine) but it's gone all the way to 1.013. I'll check again tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure that's done.

I was going for the old 1-2-3 primary, secondary, bottle plan but the SG is so low that I'm wondering whether to bother.

So for best taste should I -

1. Put it in secondary for two weeks at 18C (64F) anyway?
2. Put it in secondary for two weeks at 4C (39F) to cold condition?
3. Just bottle it and let it bottle condition for three weeks?

Any advice much appreciated.

 

[usfmikeb]

You can keep it in the primary at the same temp you fermented at for a few weeks in order to allow the yeast to do some clean up and settle out.

 

[Gothnet]

Fair enough - you wouldn't bother to transfer to another vessel then?

It's in a plastic fermenter at the moment, and the other one is glass, not that I'd expect a lot of gas to be able to get through the plastic one in the couple of weeks I'm proposing leaving it.

 

[MacGruber]

Another vote to Leave it in primary. You don't need to use secondary.

 

[Gothnet]

OK, that saves me some effort then

And is it important to keep the primary at the same low temperature (18C/64F) for the rest of this time? or can I free up my brew-fridge for another batch?

(background - I live in Australia and it's likely to be (24-28C/75-80F) in house)

 

[Yooper]

Even if fermentation is done, I'd be not inclined at all to let the beer sit at near 80 degrees. Nottingham yeast is clean at lower temperatures, but gets positively foul at above 72 or so. I'd keep it in the primary at cooler temperatures for another week, and then bottle it.

 

[Gothnet]

Cool, thanks for the advice, I'll just have to be patient for at least another week before trying out my next recipe...

 

[usfmikeb]

Your patience will be rewarded...

 

[Gothnet]

I know, but it's hard to be patient when you have more tasty brews planned...

Quick question - if I wanted to use maple syrup for bottling instead of priming sugar, what sort of quantity would you recommend?

IIRC it's around 65% sugar.

 

[usfmikeb]

I've never used it before, would recommend doing a search of the site for the word maple.

 

[Revvy]

I provide info on priming with alternative primers including maple syrup (including the link to the podcast,) and other sugars in my bottling stickey- Scroll to the lower half of this post.

It will show you how to figure out how much you need based on any nutritional info you can find, on the amount of actual sugar in them.