No secondary = less beer

[BillyEB]

Does anyone else find that you loose about 1/2 gallon because of trub when you don't use a secondary? My best beers so far have come from just using a primary fermentor but I find that I always come up a sixer or more short. Just an observation...

 

[ChshreCat]

Leave it long enough and the trub compacts right down so you can siphon all the beer right off it.

Then to make sure, I always brew 5.5 gallon batches.

 

[Nurmey]

Listen to the crazy cat above.

 

[marubozo]

There is wisdom in those last two replies. Long primary gives very compact trub and very little beer lost.

Plus, I too usually make my recipes for 5.25-5.5 gallons. You can never have enough.

 

[Edcculus]

I agree with everyone else. I also find that I loose beer every time I rack. So keeping racking down to 1 time (from primary straight into a keg) keeps racking losses to a minimum.

 

[ChshreCat]

Also, if you're using the measurements on the side of a bucket fermenter, you might be shorting yourself. They are often wrong. Get something that you know is 1 gallon and use it to fill your fermenter up and see where the 5 gallon mark really should be. You could be losing less than you think because you're not quite starting out with 5 gallons in the first place.

 

[BillyEB]

What's you average time in primary? This bad boy was in there for 7 weeks! But I will now start making 5.5 gallon batches. I hate having less beer!

 

[ChshreCat]

That should be enough time. It can vary by yeast too. Some flocculate better than others.
This is the yeast cake from a batch of my double chocolate oatmeal snout after 3 weeks, made with US-05 if I remember right...

And make sure you do check your fermenter to make sure what you think is 5 gallons is really 5 gallons.

 

[Catt22]

I brew either 6 or 12 gallon batches for just this reason. I got very tired of coming up short in the keg with only 4.5 gallons and sometimes less than that. Now I sometimes come up a little long, but any excess goes into 2 liter PET bottles, but I always get full kegs these days.

 

[buzzkill]

I get more beer by not racking to secondary. it does compact.

 

[rexbanner]

I get more beer by not racking to secondary. it does compact.

Everyone's doin it.

 

[samc]

Cold crash primary.

 

[Got Trub?]

I used to agonize about every last drop from kettle to bottle. I wanted to get as much beer squeezed out of the process as possible. Then I decided to RDWHAHB. By scaling my recipes up for the cost of pennies I get 6g after the boil, rack 5.5g to the fermentor and rack 5g into the keg. No issues with too much trub transferred to the primary or racking less than 5g into the keg/bottles. Life is good .

And listen to the cat about calibrating your buckets. And anything else that needs to be accurate. Like thermometers, hydrometers, boil kettle etc.

GT

 

[November]

+1 to the previous posts. It is very easy and cheap to scale up to 5.5 or 6.0 gallons and then end up with a 5 gallon yield. By the way, I sometimes 'lose' beer due to trub but I never 'loose' beer since my brewing technique is so tightly controlled!

 

[starrfish]

Leave it long enough and the trub compacts right down so you can siphon all the beer right off it.

Then to make sure, I always brew 5.5 gallon batches.

LOL CAT is Da' Man

base everything on 5.5 gal, you will lose more racking to secondary and then racking to bottle... long primarys are ok... that was not realized until recently... one flaw in papazian books. I've only had "yeast bite" once and that was on a mead that sat on primary for 12 months, then racked to secondary for 3 more... should have been other way around... oops live and learn!

 

[david_42]

Since I brew in pails and can't monitor clearness, I wait for the trub to compact before racking to a keg. That I can see happening. Works every time, with very little loss.

 

[Brew-boy]

Sound like a batch size problem to me. Shoot for 5.5 gallons into the primary and ferment for 3 weeks and you will have more beer than you need.

 

[Revvy]

More beer for me as well. Nice tight trub layer means more beer. I shoot for 5 gallons, and between long primary and bottling bucket dip tube I get on average 54 12 ounce beers.

What I do is once I start the autosiphon I hold it above the trub layer til it runs clear. Then I carefully lower it to the bottom and let some yeast/trub flow in, this insures there's plenty of yeast to do the job (I often rub the AS across the bottom once for this very reason.)

After about a minute the beer forms a natural runnel in the trub layer and begins to run clear again. Then I just let it flow til there's no beer left and stop before anymore trub flows in. The beer comes right off the surface of the trub, and there's little left behind.

 

[Priemus]

I leave it alone about 3 weeks in primary and it gets real hard, i can stick the tip of the cain right into it and it doesnt suck much up. Its like clay.