Yeah, I gathered as much. Unfortunately that's a side effect of knowledge and experience on the internets, especially on forums such as these: you become incapable of answering the simple questions with simple answers because you know too much. I always likened it to when your 7 year old comes to you with help on his math homework and you start talking advanced calculus to him. He'll appreciate it at 17 when he's actually taking calculus, but at 7? Not so much.
In fairness, it's hard to tell where someone is in brewing and just how much to simplify things to hit their sweet spot.
What you were asking was, in truth, fairly difficult to answer effectively, because it DOES depend on a lot of variables.
1. Secondaries aren't necessary unless you're doing something weird like adding fruit or maybe a weird infusion or something. You don't need it, and it just increases the chances for oxidation and contamination. Avoid.
That's one of those prime examples of 'ask 10 people, get 11 answers' though isn't it? Some folks seem to swear by it, some not at all. lol
Would it be fair to say that 'necessary' is the operative word here? That it can be a beneifcial technique but that omitting it is never going to ruin your beer, whereas if you do it wrong you definitely run that risk?
No. When you say "it can be a beneficial technique" you have to include the context. I daresay you're not seeing very many experienced brewers here say "it can be beneficial" unless they're throwing the wort on fruit or something like that.
The first time I didn't use a secondary the beer was as good (I'd say better) than when I did use one.
The whole secondary thing (aside from fruit/other additions/ or when you're aging for a long time) comes from a time when yeast wasn't as good, and there was concern about autolysis, when is when yeast dies, the cell walls break open, icky stuff enters the beer, and you get bad flavors.
That's pretty much over with, and it's hard to identify a reason to secondary, on top of the fact of potential contamination and oxygen exposure.
How long in primary? As I approach the end of fermentation, for an ale, I'll bump the temp up to 71f for a couple days, then down again to the main temp (typically 64-67). I'll let it sit on the yeast cake for a while; I've found it helps the beer mature and lose its greenness. But I have kegged beers in 7 days (wanted to clear the fermenter for another batch), and after a little while to condition, they've been great.
So anywhere from 7 days to 28, though I don't want to go longer than that as an extended time in primary can result in off flavors. But more typically, 7-14 days.
OK so at least a week, but 2 weeks is probably closer to the sweet spot...2 weeks +/- a week
I know what you're looking for--I was looking for it too, which is a set of ironclad rules on which you can rely. You have to look at the process, and that varies from recipe to recipe. At minimum, you should have fermentation complete, which can be as short as 2.5 days to maybe even a couple weeks, depending on temp the wort is feremented, the type of yeast, pitch rate, yada, yada, yada. The better approach is to simply identify when fermentation is complete, rather than focusing on some kind of time frame.
2. Beer brewing is a pretty resilient process; you have to work hard to screw things up so long as you follow good sanitation practices and are close to what the recipe says to do. Small alterations may change what the final outcome is, but only on the margins; you'll still get beer. And likely good beer.
I've been meticulous about that so hopefully that pays off
Thanks for all the tips, that helps me a lot, cheers
IMO, the big thing for newbies is to BREW. Get one under your belt, and then suddenly all that stuff you've read about makes much more sense. Your sanitation is meticulous, so the only question is the process and the recipe. As long as you're close, you'll get beer, and who knows, if you miss by some small amount, the beer might even taste better to you than if you hadn't.
I gave up, probably around batch 20, trying to hit some mythical target, and started focusing on what I wanted to drink. IMO, too many new brewers are overly focused on minute details like hitting exactly the number of IBUs, or getting their efficiency to a certain number, or being exact in their water utilization, or whatever.
Two more things:
First, IMO new brewers should focus more on perfecting the process than on trying new brews all over the place. If you keep changing the recipes and you have issues in the brewing, how can you isolate the issue? You can't.
I fell victim to that trap, trying to clone a beer right from the get-go when I should have been learning the process and trying to repeat it with a beer. When you have the process down, then you can fiddle with recipes, water, ferm temp, whatever and have some confidence that changes are the result of that and not variance in the process.
Second, I'm a huge proponent of Continuous Quality Improvement. Every time I brew, I try to do something better than last time. The cumulative effect is very powerful--after a while, you find your beer is great, because you've continuously tried to make it better. If you do that, I have no doubt your beer will get to the point where it's celebrated.