Head Space in Secondary/Bottling bucket

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aamcle

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Evening all.

When I rack into my bottling bucket/secondary fermenter there is air filled head space above the beer, will leaving the beer for a week or two in the bottling bucket damage it?
Should I use a secondary/bottling bucket with minimal headspace or flush the headspace with Co2?


Many Thanks. Aamcle
 
There should be very little head space in secondary. I used the bottling bucket as a secondary to oak my beer once. Even at 6 gallons there was still some 4" at least of head space. I oaked for 8 days & the beer was fine. Maybe the oak made it off gass enough co2 to protect it. My bottling bucket is the shorter wide one with the HBT-like pic on the front,said to be 7.9G. Idk about that though...
 
You don't use the "secondary" and the bottling bucket in one step. There will be trub in the bottom of the clearing vessel, plus the headspace for a bucket is too wide.

If you're going to use a secondary (I rarely do), then use a carboy for it. Then you can rack off of the trub into the bottling bucket with the priming sugar solution and bottle from there.
 
Def this^^. I was stuck for a secondary I didn't have to oak in. It was a bit tricky to bottle. To say the least. gotta get a 5G & a 6G secondary to do it again. I make 6 gallon batches occasionally,necessitating the need for two different size secondarys. Better Bottles I'm thinking,since they won't be aging for months on end. Should be ok for oaking & the like...
 
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