Transferring to secondary will help produce clearer beer though, yes?
Not to those of us who long primary, we think it lends a clearer, and cleaner tasting beer,
that's why we choose to do it, not because we're lazy. We think it's better than secondarying, because the contact with the yeast cleans up the byproducts of fermentation, and then flocculates more fully and the yeastcake compresses, leaving less yeast actually in the beer.
This is my yeastcake for my Sri Lankin Stout that sat in primary for 5 weeks. Notice how tight the yeast cake is? None of that got racked over to my bottling bucket. And the beer is extremely clear.
That little bit of beer to the right is all of the 5 gallons that DIDN'T get vaccumed off the surface of the tight trub. When I put 5 gallons in my fermenter, I tend to get 5 gallons into bottles. The cake itself is like cement, it's about an inch thick and very, very dense, you can't just tilt your bucket and have it fall out. I had to use water pressure to get it to come out.
Ths is the last little bit of the same beer in the bottling bucket, this is the only sediment that made it though and that was done on purpose, when I rack I always make sure to rub the autosiphon across the bottom of the primary to make sure there's plenty of yeast in suspension to carb the beer, but my bottles are all crystal clear and have little sediment in them.
Half the time I forget to use moss, and you can't tell the difference in clarity.
Another thing is to leave your beer in the fridge for at least a week. The longer you chill the beer in the fridge, the tighter the yeast cake. I had a beer in the back of my fridge for 3 months, that I could completely upend and no yeast came out. Longer in the cold the tighter the yeast cake becomes. Even just chilling for a week (besides getting rid of chill haze) will go to great lengths to allow you to leave the yeast behind, but with only a minimum amount of beer.
The only filtering I've ever done has been through my kidneys.
I get the barest hint of sediment in my bottles....just enough for the yeast to have done the job of carbonating the beer.
THIS is where the latest discussion and all your questions answered.
We have multiple threads about this all over the place, like this one,so we really don't need to go over it again, all the info you need is here;
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/secondary-not-john-palmer-jamil-zainasheff-weigh-176837/
You'll find that more and more recipes these days do not advocate moving to a secondary at all, but mention primary for a month, which is starting to reflect the shift in brewing culture that has occurred in the last 4 years, MOSTLY because of many of us on here, skipping secondary, opting for longer primaries, and writing about it. Recipes in BYO have begun stating that in their magazine. I remember the "scandal" it caused i the letters to the editor's section a month later, it was just like how it was here when we began discussing it, except a lot more civil than it was here. But after the Byo/Basic brewing experiment, they started reflecting it in their recipes.
