im a noob and have a few questions

[david83]

first off let me say hi,i brewed a kit last night i got for xmas it is a scottish light ale from midwest supplies i had my friend over who has brewed a few batches to help.i got a og reading of 1.042 my question is what is the fg im looking for before i move it to the carboy for secondary fermentation.

 

[beerthirty]

The kit should have supplied you with an expected FG. If it didn't don't worry about it. Let it sit in the fermenter for 2-3 weeks before taking a hydrometer reading. Then take readings every couple days until it stops dropping. At this point you are ready to secondary or bottle. Many of us will leave it in the fermenter for 3 weeks before we take our first reading. This gives the yeast time to clean up byproducts that are produced during fermentation. Welcome to the forum david83.

 

[david83]

so once i put it in the carboy how long should it sit in there?

 

[beerthirty]

Many go 3 weeks, but some go as little as 4 days. How good do you want your beer to be? Yeast are living organisms and we all know better than rush mother nature.

 

[david83]

has little has four days in the glass carboy then to bottling?sounds interesting but like you said better not to rush.another question for you down the road when im ready to bottle and go to add the priming sugar do i add the sugar then the wort or wort then put the priming sugar in?

 

[HomelessWook]

has little has four days in the glass carboy then to bottling?sounds interesting but like you said better not to rush.another question for you down the road when im ready to bottle and go to add the priming sugar do i add the sugar then the wort or wort then put the priming sugar in?

i believe the preferred method is to add the priming mixture to the bottling bucket then pour the wort on top of it - this process will ensure a well mixed wort for bottling.

however my recipe says to dump it in on top of the wort in the bottling bucket

 

[david83]

hmm sounds good ill try it that way then.i finished up brewing the wort last night around 10 oclock and just checked the airlock and ive got bubbling already is that normal i used a liquid yeast i thought i read that they took longer to start fermenting?

 

[HomelessWook]

from what i have read

it can take longer - that's why people use starters for it - but it really just depends on the temperature of the wort at the time you pitched the yeast and the temperature it is kept at during fermenting (pretty sure you can quote me on this)

just sit back and relax

my first batch is about 10 days old in the primary fermenter still - just listen to Revvvy - he knows what he speaks of

and i would go to barns and noble and get 'how to brew' by john palmer

easy to read and understand but also gets pretty detailed in beginner techniques.

 

[david83]

ok thanks for the advice.ill have to check into that book.

 

[bull8042]

has little has four days in the glass carboy then to bottling?sounds interesting but like you said better not to rush.another question for you down the road when im ready to bottle and go to add the priming sugar do i add the sugar then the wort or wort then put the priming sugar in?

Boil a couple of cups of water, add sugar and continue boil for 10 minutes or so. Then pour this into your bottling bucket and rack your beer on top of it. Stirring is usually unnecessary if you do it this way, but not a bad practice just to ensure even carbonation. Make sure NOT to aerate or splash, either when racking or stirring. O2 is bad for beer this late in the process unless you like the taste of wet cardboard months down the road.

Also, check out http://www.howtobrew.com
This is Palmer's site and had the 1st edition of his book online for free. Not the latest, but still accurate for all intents and purposes.

 

[david83]

thank you all for the info this is why these forums for hobbies are so great.

 

[HomelessWook]

i have learned more about beer in the last 11 days then i knew before. i am a young brewer so that may be one of the reasons but i also just caught the fever. home brewing is an amazing process with endless possibilities.

 

[mongoose33]

For your first brew, be a little conservative here. Let it go the three weeks. Then check gravity with the hydrometer, then again 2 days later. If same reading and reasonably close to what the kit indicated, then bottle it.

There's a lot to learn in brewing to do it well. It's not rocket science but neither is it simplistic. My advice to new brewers is to stay as simple as reasonable early on in their brewing career. Better to brew a simple beer in an excellent fashion than attempt a complicated beer with process errors.

The more variables you allow, the greater the chance you'll screw one of them up (don't ask my how I know this), and if the beer doesn't turn out, then how do you identify the culprit?

There's a lot to learn, a lot of arcane language and definitions: hydrometer, gravity, tun, mash, krausen, sparge, vorlauf, and on and on and on.

But you know what is the single most difficult thing to learn in brewing?

Patience. Once you get some beer in the pipeline that will be easier, but in the meantime we want to rush the process. While its possible to speed things up, that's not the way to bet, and it is best done with some experience to back up your intuition.

I once did a Kolsch that went from brew day to serving out of a keg in 11 days, and it was a fabulous beer. But that's the exception, and I have some specialized equipment that helped me do that. A 3-week time frame is a more reasonable one for most beers, though there are exceptions on the margins.

 

[VikeMan]

For your first brew, be a little conservative here. Let it go the three weeks.

So far, it's been going for over 10 years.

 

[mongoose33]

So far, it's been going for over 10 years.

That's weird. That showed up as a new post and I just replied to it, didn't notice the date. How would that have even gotten on my radar? Huh.