how long before racking to secondary?

[drvodka]

hey guys
so the bubbling in my primary is still fairly quick after 6 days of fermenting (around a bubble every 5 secs, slowed from the initial bubble every two secs). MY question is what is the general rule of thumb for racking to secondary?
Is it:
a) rack after about a week to avoid letting it sit on the trub for too long, regardless of bubbling rate/hydrometer reading
or
b) wait implicitly until the hydrometer reading shows a stabilization

is racking to a secondary too early necessarily a bad thing? the only thing I can think of is that if there is still a lot of unfermented sugars in the wort and you rack to a secondary, you are giving the live yeast in there another decent chance at metabolizing th sugars, and they may kick off into a second round of intense fermentation. is that the reason to wait for the hydrometer reading to calm down?

cheers

 

[Sasquatch]

In all honesty, rack whenever you feel like it. I rack when the main foamy action settles down...after 3 -5 days, usually. But a bit longer, or a bit early... isn't really going to kill you.

 

[timdsmith72]

I generally rack when the bubbling slows down to once every 45-60 seconds...But that's just me.......

 

[Cheesefood]

Someone once mentioned the 1-2-3 rule:

1 week in primary
2 weeks in secondary
3 weeks in the bottle (one @ room temp, 2 in the fridge)

I suspect some beers will take longer if they're higher gravity or require some lagering.

 

[drvodka]

yeah mine was a pretty high gravity ale (1.054 OG) so I think I'll be giving it a fair while in the secondary and in the bottles.....
cheers for the advice.
I racked over from my primary yesterday after checking the hydrometer reading - it had dropped from 1.054 to 1.024 in 5 days, my calculated FG is 1.018 so I thought I was pretty close and would let it finish off in the secondary.....