Howdy!

[tom9d]

Greetings, folks. I'm Tom from New York. Nice to meet y'all.

My brother got me a Mr. Beer kit years ago for Christmas. I used it, bought a second Mr. Beer keg (for some reason), made quite a few batches with 'em, including some that my friends and I thought were pretty damn good, all things considered.

I moved a couple of years ago and stopped brewing. Then recently, I got the urge to start again. Always knew there was more out there than Mr. Beer. So I dusted off those old kegs one more time just to reacquaint myself with the process and went and ordered a real set-up.*

I've been doing lots of research on brewing the past couple of weeks and my searches kept taking me here, so I figured I might as well sign up. And here I am.

*It's rather sparse at the moment. Just a pair of 6.5 gallon pails at the moment - one for a primary and one for bottling. Along with all the necessary hosing and little things. Popular opinion around here, if I'm not mistaken, seems to be that you might as well not use a secondary unless you're doing a fruit beer or something like that, because a primary will get the job done just fine. Yes? No? So I figure I'll get some easier brews out of the way first and invest in a secondary a few months down the road.

 

[jwbeard]

The consensus seems to be to avoid a secondary unless, as you mentioned, you're (a) doing an addition (fruit, dry-hopping, chocolate nibs, etc), or (b) doing a long fermenting beer (e.g. a lager or a "big" beer with higher than 1.060 OG) that is going to be sitting on the yeast cake for a long time. Over a long enough period, the yeast will start breaking down their less lively brethren (autolysis), which will produce off-flavors. Most modern yeasts don't do this quickly, though, so unless it's going to be sitting on the cake for several weeks it's not worth re-racking since it effectively re-aerates the beer. After yeast has gone through its initial life cycle, oxygen in the beer is a bad thing and will make it stale. Generally, especially for your early brews, don't worry about a secondary.

When and if you do need to rack to secondary, it is possible to minimize the adverse effect of aeration, though. The best way to do it is to time it so that you transfer after active fermentation is complete, but before it's completely done. This ensures that at least a thin layer of CO2 will be produced and protect the beer from the oxygen in the newly-aerated headspace. This won't do much to offset the aeration of the beer from sloshing around during the transfer, though.

My method is to purge the secondary with CO2 before I even start the transfer. This way, even if the transfer makes the beer slosh around violently, it's only sloshing through CO2. This method obviously requires you have a CO2 tank, though, which you may not have (yet)

 

[tom9d]

Ah, good to know. Thanks!

 

[uncle_jimbo]

Between your use of "howdy" and "y'all," I'm guessing you aren't originally from New York. I'm a transplanted Texan in Arizona and I stand out like a sort thumb for using words like those.

 

[tom9d]

Believe it or not, I was born and raised in the Bronx and lived there all my life until about eight months ago when I moved ever so slightly north to the suburbs. I don't know why I say "howdy" and "y'all," but I say lots of things that don't seem to fit me

 

[2PintsLow]

Welcome to the forums Tom!

 

[Kegcowboy]

Howdy Tom! Glad you are here.- Jeff