Autolysis confusion

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theCougfan97

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Please bear with me if this is a dumb question, but it seems I have read its fairly common to skip the secondary fermenter. I have now found this scary new word Autolysis. Is the risk low enough that people are not concerned about this happening? Or are there other factors at play I am not aware of?
 
better, newer yeast avoid this problem.
brewing less than 50gal avoids this problem.
fermenting for less than 4 weeks avoids this problem.

all in all you have to try pretty hard to get autolysis.
 
The risk is virtually nonexistent. This has been the topic of debate for years on this forum, and to this day, there has yet to be a single person who has discovered autolysis in their homebrew... as far as I know. Many people have left their beer in primary for upward of a year or more and still have not had a problem. Problem for pro brewers with beer fermenting on the order of tons? Maybe. Not for homebrewers.
 
yeah, everything I've read says that you would have to leave your beer in the primary for more than 4 weeks before you get enough dead yeast decomposing to affect flavor.
 
From what I've been reading autolysis is a potential factor for big breweries. Imagine you have a few hundred gallons of beer sitting on top of yeast that's fallen out of suspension and is being squeezed down into the conical portion of a fermenter, crushed by the massive weight of all the beer above. That's why they dump the yeast or transfer the beer to a brite tank at the appropriate time (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an authority on the operations of big breweries). For 5 gallons of beer sitting on the yeast after it flocculates, you shouldn't have any concerns. I'm a new brewer and I personally haven't left any beer in the primary longer than 4 weeks but I've been reading plenty of reports of people leaving it for months.
 
Tupperwolf said:
From what I've been reading autolysis is a potential factor for big breweries. Imagine you have a few hundred gallons of beer sitting on top of yeast that's fallen out of suspension and is being squeezed down into the conical portion of a fermenter, crushed by the massive weight of all the beer above. That's why they dump the yeast or transfer the beer to a brite tank at the appropriate time (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an authority on the operations of big breweries). For 5 gallons of beer sitting on the yeast after it flocculates, you shouldn't have any concerns. I'm a new brewer and I personally haven't left any beer in the primary longer than 4 weeks but I've been reading plenty of reports of people leaving it for months.

+1
On a small home brew scale auto lysis is not an issue. In a big commercial brewery it is

The sheer weight of the beer crushes the yeast cells creating problems. 5 gallons is not a big deal, 500 gallons is:)
 
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