New to brewing! Hello Everyone!

[billey100]

Hey folks newbie here, just wanted to say thanks for the help in advance. I have been lurking for awhile and getting a lot of great tips from here. Finally decided to register and throw some of those questions out that I have wondered about but not quite sure. I have brewed up one batch so far, a nut brown ale kit that seemed to good to me and to others but hard to really tell as it was my first time. I have been very fortunate as my uncle was into this a few years ago, he moved to Florida and sold me everything I have for $100 bucks! I have enough equipment to do about 6 batches at a time, plus a lot of the little extra bells and whistles to go along with it. My biggest fear is screwing something up or doing something the wrong way and never really knowing why. My first batch I bottled in 1/2 gallon growlers and this batch I am moving up to soda kegs and a kegorator. I wanted to throw out a few questions bare with me I an wordy:

I bought an american wheat kit from Grape and Granary with a cherry puree. I boiled and moved the wort to my primary fermenter a 6 gal carboy w/o filtering. It has been in the primary for about 5 days now and is down to about 1 bubble per minute. According to the instructions I can now move this to a secondary and add the puree. Here are my questions 1. If I choose to use the puree and move it to the secondary do I need to filter upon moving it from the primary to the secondary if eventually I am going to be keggin it? 2. Along with that whether I filter then or not do I need to filter it going from the seconadry to the keg itself. Other than cosmetic reasons will this gum up the soda keg tube? 3. What happens to the puree, does it settle to the bottom, dissolve or just stay there? Is racking it good enough to remove any puree remnants? 4. I also have a bottle of cherry extract I got from my uncle that can be used instead of the puree how is this process different? I know it wont be as good as real cherries but does the concentrate bottle save time? Can I just add the concentrate to the primary when I open it and just rack that straight to the soda keg and skip the seconadry? Or does the concentrate need the same process of sitting in the seconadry for a few weeks? 5. Also is it good to rack the primary straight into the keg after the 5 days or should I leave it in the primary for longer even though it looks to be done?

I have a bunch of other questions but I think I will stop there and let everyone catch their breath.

 

[phidelt844]

Hello and welcome!

The common theory is 1-2-3. 1 week primary, 2 weeks secondary, 3 weeks bottled. Since you are kegging, I would suggest 3 weeks prior to kegging as a general guideline, but a hydrometer reading will give you a definite answer to fermentation progress.

I'm not familiar with adding cherry puree, and I'm not sure what you mean by filtering going from primary -> secondary -> keg. You should be racking everything out, and leaving the trub behind. My suggestion would be to wait a couple days, or even take a gravity reading if the instructions tell you where your FG should land. Then rack (siphon) from the primary to the secondary, leaving the trub at the bottom behind. Add your puree and let sit for a couple weeks, and then rack it again to your keg, once again leaving the bulk of the gunk behind.

I'm not sure on the cherry puree vs cherry extract question.

I would not recommend moving your beer from the primary to the keg after 5 days. You have the option of using a corny as your secondary, but if you have a different secondary vessel you may as well use that IMO. If you want to skip the secondary, you should be able to add your puree to the primary and let that sit for a couple weeks. A secondary is just used to aid in clearing, but many brewers skip it and just let everything condition in the primary.

One other comment - you metioned you bottled your first brew in 1/2 gallon growlers. Did you achieve carbonation? My understanding was that these growlers don't hold pressure very well and are difficult if not impossible to carb in.

Hopefully someone else can chime in and give you some advice on the cherry stuff. Happy brewing!

 

[Saccharomyces]

If you are adding fruit to a secondary vessel you are really doing a second fermentation, NOT just conditioning, so I would rack it while the yeast are still active. You have lots of yeast in suspension at this point; if you wait longer, you will have fewer yeast left do ferment the fruit, resulting in a sluggish fermentation in the secondary vessel.

Note this goes against the usual practice of letting things settle out in the primary for 10-14 days and then racking to secondary if at all, since in that case you are simply using the secondary as a bright tank to flocc out more yeast and sediment before going to the serving vessel.

If you use the concentrate I recommend waiting until conditioning and carbing is complete in the keg (i.e. you are about to start drinking it!). Disconnect the gas, bleed the pressure with the valve, remove the lid, drop in the concentrate and stir gently with a sanitized spoon. Refix the lid (spray with sanitizer from a spray bottle first) and re-pressurize the keg. You should also re-purge the headspace in case you got any O2 in there. In a few days you're ready to tap. The fruit flavor will fade over a few months so it will be best served fresh. If you want, you can also add more concentrate as it fades with age by repeating the same process, of course!

Welcome.

 

[billey100]

Thanks guys that is helping. So bottom line is maybe for this one since I might actually be past the point of having good yeast left I should just let it go the full 2 weeks in the primary. Then keg it and add the fruit concentrate after it has been carbonated? In the future I need to get it into a secondary quicker and add the puree. So what you are saying is that in theory you could go right from the primary to the keg after 5 days or so but, next best would be to let is sit and clear in the primary for 2 weeks, and the best would be to put it in a secondary after a week and then keg after 3 weeks total? I guess what I am saying is you cant really make un-drinkable by making it shorter it just makes it a lot better to do it longer?

Thanks for the concentrate help, that makes sense. One last question how critical is it that once you put the airlock on it, that you never break that seal? I am deathly afraid of breaking that seal at anypoint up until I bottled it last time but does it really matter? Am I being crazy for no reason? How do people check the gravity reading if you are using a carboy and not a bucket with a spout? Should I be using the bucket becasue its easier or stick with teh carboy?

phidelt844 I seemded to have good luck with the growlers. I cant say for sure becasue I dont have anything to comapre it to but I had really good foam on almost all my pours. Everyone that drank it said it tasted good and I thought so too. I had a mix of grolwers some with the grolsch style flip top with rubber and some with screw-on tops and I didnt notice any difference between the two. I could see maybe with the screw-on type if you didnt get a good seal with the top of the bottle to the bottom of the lid it would be a problem. But the flop top type are basically the same concept as the 12oz bottles I have so I assumed its basically the same deal?

 

[Saccharomyces]

Thanks guys that is helping. So bottom line is maybe for this one since I might actually be past the point of having good yeast left I should just let it go the full 2 weeks in the primary. Then keg it and add the fruit concentrate after it has been carbonated? In the future I need to get it into a secondary quicker and add the puree. So what you are saying is that in theory you could go right from the primary to the keg after 5 days or so but, next best would be to let is sit and clear in the primary for 2 weeks, and the best would be to put it in a secondary after a week and then keg after 3 weeks total? I guess what I am saying is you cant really make un-drinkable by making it shorter it just makes it a lot better to do it longer?

My usual scheme is to do 2-4 weeks in the primary and rack straight to the keg. For fruit in the secondary I would rack after 3-4 days onto the fruit so there are plenty of yeast in suspension, and give it 3-4 weeks in the carboy before racking to the keg so everything is nice and settled out. You don't have to rack before adding the fruit though; you can add the fruit to the primary. The beer police won't come and arrest you for doing that. There are lots of ways to skin a cat!

It's best to let the beer sit on the trub after fermentation slows for awhile so the yeast can clean things up. A LOT of n00b beers I have sampled that had diacetyl or other minor flavor issues were because the beer was racked to a secondary too soon before the yeast consumed the byproducts of fermentation. Adding extra fermentables to the secondary causes yeast growth and more fermentation, so this is less of an issue.

Most commercial breweries seem to do 11-14 day primary fermentation for ales (3-4 weeks or more for big beers like IIPA or Imperial Stouts). Then they transfer to a conditioning tank, and slowly drop the temp from 70*F down to 34*F over 10-14 days which causes the yeast to drop out. Then they filter and keg or bottle. At bottling they add yeast with the priming solution since they filtered out the primary yeast strain in a previous step. If you can do this in your setup at home, great! Otherwise getting close to what the big guys do will make very good beer.

Since most of us don't have the ability to crash cool in a secondary, a four week primary followed by a two week cold conditioning period in the keg makes excellent beer every time. A wheat beer won't clear anyway, so two weeks in the fermenter before kegging is fine.

One last question how critical is it that once you put the airlock on it, that you never break that seal? I am deathly afraid of breaking that seal at anypoint up until I bottled it last time but does it really matter? Am I being crazy for no reason? How do people check the gravity reading if you are using a carboy and not a bucket with a spout? Should I be using the bucket becasue its easier or stick with teh carboy?

Wash your hands well and spray them with sanitizer. Spray around the opening of the fermenter with StarSan in a spray bottle, remove the lid/bung, and do whatever you are going to do (take a sample with a sanitized thief for a hydrometer reading for instance). Re-sanitize the lid/bung by dipping it in sanitizer or spraying it down with a spray bottle and re-affix. No worries. You won't infect your brew.

Growlers don't seal well. Most are not designed for conditioning under pressure but instead for serving. The Grolsh-type flip tops work quite well. I have a dozen 1L bottles I like to use for bottle conditioning a few from every batch I bottle for parties. The screw-on type bottles are definitely a no go. I have read horror stories about exploded growlers.

 

[billey100]

Thanks Sac that explains a lot. I think I am definitely going to skip the puree on this one is a secondary and let it sit another few days in the primary. I think like you said I might have gone to long in the primary to now move it to the secondary and then add the fruit and have it ferment anytime this decade. So I will go with leaving it in the primary and then put it in the keg and add the fruit concentrate in the keg after it has been charged? Then let the keg sit for a week or so in the fridge.

Oh boy I dont like to hear the growler exploding thing, nor would my wife! Thanks for the heads up, I will stick to the flip top ones in an emergency but from now on I will just keg it. It's things like those that I want to learn, just becasue you get away with it once doesn't mean it's right or that I should be doing it.

One last question I thought of with kegging it. If I have my first keg in the fridge and the pressure is set to my normal 8-10 for dispensing right. What do I do with my next keg that I make. Is it ok to disonnect the gas line from the first keg, charge the second keg to 30 or so disconnect again and go back to teh first keg putting the pressure back down? Not concerned about the first keg as much as the second, will the carbonation still take place if you charge the second keg and leave it disconnected for a few days or does it need the tank hooked up to it? Also can you just leave them in the fridge for a long time with nothing hooked up to them? And lastly I see a lot of people with more than one keg hooked up to one tank with various differnt hose configurations. If you have a gas splitter inside going to two tanks and two cans with seperate taps so you could run both kegs at teh same time do you run the same pressure? What I mean is, with two tanks hooked up do you need to run double the psi or it doesnt matter how many tanks you have hooked up?

Again thanks for the help, I know I am all over the place but I am thinking of things as I go.