When do i rack to secondary

I have a batch of Nut Brown Ale that has been in the primary for 9 days. Still getting some slow action in the airlock and there is a 1" layer of krausen on the beer. How do you decide when to move the beer? Do you wait until the krausen begins to clear? Do you move only after all airlock activity stops? Or, do you just move the beer at "x" days no matter what? I just do it by the calinder 10 days and let it sit in the secondary for weeks or untill I have room in the keg fridge.

The other way is to take a reading and ensure its at terminal gravity before proceeding. Mozel Tov. Do you always use a secondary fermenter? When I started brewing last fall I thought it was a standard procedure. Now I am learning that some guys leave their beer in the primary all the way up to bottling day.

Back in cooking school when asked "How long do I cook this? This residue is composed of additional wort proteins, hop residue and resins, and dead yeast. This bitter residue, if stirred back into the beer, could cause off flavors.

But fortunately, they are somewhat insoluble and mostly just stay stuck to the side of the fermenter. There are still fermentation by-products in the beer such as diacetyl, acetaldehyde and DMS that need to be cleaned up by the yeast that are still suspended in the beer.

For a low-gravity ale, it is probably not necessary to rack over for a secondary fermentation unless you want to give the beer more time to clarify and condition. But, if you have a higher-gravity beer, or your yeast does not flocculate well, you may want to give the beer an extended amount of time to clarify. Basically you are just allowing the beer to drop bright and get rid of all the proteins and micro-particles that could possibly cause problems with your beer after packaging.

The major obstacl e to racking a young beer seems to be the worry about oxygen ingress and all that entails, ie. Reduced shelf-life, staling, oxidation of malts which reduces malt flavors and aromas, etc. Nothing good can come from getting any oxygen in your beer at this point. What I recommend is transferring your beer from primary to secondary with CO2 pressure in a closed system. Even if you use an auto-siphon to transfer your beer to a secondary vessel, by purging the receiving vessel and laying a blanket of CO2 on top of the beer in the primary, and back-flushing your siphon with CO2, you should be able to transfer from primary to secondary with very little to no oxygen contamination.

Just make sure your hoses are tight so no oxygen can enter the system. VikeMan likes this. When in doubt, wait a month. My rule of thumb is never. My secondary is a 5 gal ball-lock keg. I have two beverages in secondary containers right now. One is a mead and the other is a sour.

In general, I only use a secondary if I need to age, sour, or ferment fruit. In contrast, I have several beers right now that were packaged directly from the primary fermenter: a saison, a mild, a scotch ale, and an IPA. Tebuken Initiate 0 Jun 6, Argentina.