Secondary Fermentation - Racking/Transfer to a Secondary Fermenter

welcome back to cityscape brewing today we're transferring the beer that we just made in our how to brew video to a secondary if you haven't seen our how to brew this step-by-step instructions for all grain brewing i'm going to link that in the video description below for you today we're finishing up our oberon american wheat ale we're going to be transferring that to a secondary now that fermentation has completed as you notice and you might notice this in your own batch when it was brewing it had a nice foamy cap on here and since the brewing has finalized you may have noticed that that cap has actually fallen down in back into the beer might have some slight residue and stuff on the top that's normal and then a lot of the stuff at the bottom has just condensed into like a true on the bottom of the fermenter and so that's super normal as well and so primary fermentation is done and we're going to be going into what we call secondary fermentation or conditioning your beer before packaging whether that be bottles or cakes after the fact so today we're going to be transferring this one into a secondary one thing to mention is that secondary fermenting is optional a lot of people leave it in this primary vessel for the remainder of the conditioning period and they you can either cold crash that and then package or just go straight to a bottling bucket and bottle your beers or go right into a keg after that i choose for most of my beers to go into a secondary it helps for clear beer i feel like and as long as you're not really oxidizing your beer and splashing it around too much i think it really helps but you may find that that's something you don't want to do and that's totally normal the only time i don't go into a secondary a lot of times is for hazy beers where oxidation is particularly important for that style of beard in this particular case this is just a american wheat ale i'm going to go ahead and show you guys how to transfer to a secondary that helps clean up the beer i'll leave that in there for a week and during this time this is when you would normally go into something like dry hopping or if you're doing a sour with some fruit in it you would put a your fruit in it this period and so secondaries can be beneficial for a variety of reasons but we'll get right into it before you get to this stage where you pull out your vessel you don't want to shake it around a whole lot you don't want to disturb uh the settlement that's already happened in the beer a lot so you want to be very careful bring this in uh set it in a high place because we're going to be using our racking cane and uh auto siphon to be able to get it into the secondary vessel so before we get to the stage make sure that you have your auto siphon and hose set cleaned and sanitized and then your secondary prime secondary vessel in this case i'm going to be using a glass cardboard six and a half gallon glass cardboard and lid you'll also need a bung and an air stop uh assuming air lock and this i'm using the s style of this kit and this and the bung in the top you can also use another bucket or if in this case you have a a smaller uh mouth glass cardboard you'd use a bung like this one has on the top and and one of the two air locks in the top in this case you're not going to see a lot of fermentation action in the secondary so an airlock like this style or the can style is sufficient so i'm going to go ahead and get right into it when we're transferring this we're also going to take a gravity reading so you're going to want to make sure you have your hydrometer ready and then your cylinder to put the hydrometer in and this is important because in the learn to brew video we used a refractometer in this case we're going to use a hydrometer because the refractometer i will need a calculation because now the work has turned into beer now that primary fermentation is done there's alcohol content in here and it throws off the reading of your refractometer so your hydrometer reading is what you're going to want to do at this stage so with that i'll show you how to get that done let's get it set up to transfer to the next vessel all right so we got our raccoon cane it's all sanitized we're going to go ahead and put the outlet into the new vessel that's already cleaned and sanitized under our secondary fermentation vessel in this case i have a little clip thing here and i'm going to use that once we get this into the primary fermenter but in auto site what you're going to do is you're going to stick that into the primary and you're going to pump it until the gravity takes hold inside of this tube and it's going to go on down to the secondary vessel what you don't want is there to be a lot of room between the bottom of this secondary vessel and the tube because you don't want a lot of oxidation to get inside of this vessel sometimes i even pump a little bit of co2 inside of this but that's not a big deal as long as you're not creating a lot of air bubbles and that kind of stuff so you don't want to drop in there you want to be as as smooth as possible with this little bit of introduction of oxygen as possible so i'm going to go ahead and stick this into my primary and then i'm going to pump it a couple times once i get it about half way down i'm going to bring it up i'm going to pump it a couple times and that's going to bring the beard down this hose and gravity is going to do the work from here on out so then the beer the hose is on the bottom of the the fermentation vessel and it is just circulating in there but i don't want it to be splashing around a lot and so what it's doing right now is it's just filling up from the primary into the secondary vessel and right away what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my cylinder that i have for my hydrometer reading and i'm going to fill this up as as carefully as i can so what i'm going to do is i'm going to reach down grab this hose i'm going to fill this up i want it to be about three quarters of the way full so i have enough to do my hydrometer reading but without splashing a lot and introducing oxygen into the secondary fermenter so i'm going to go ahead and grab that and i'm going to bring it up the side of the fermentation chamber a little bit so even if it does splash a little bit it is on the side of the chamber i'm going to go ahead and fill this up going to quickly get it back down to the bottom so introduce as little oxygen as possible but here we go we have a a cylinder full of our new beard let's set that off to the side and we're going to do a hydrometer reading so this is now coming down our auto siphon is kind of set against the side of it and as we get closer to the bottom here i'm going to have to lower that down what i don't want to do is disturb this this true that's on the bottom so i'll take off the harness a little bit so you can see that but there is a layer of yeast and true on the bottom of this vessel and you probably see it better without the harness there but it's a white cake basically it's about this big round and you could reuse this because that a lot of that is yeast into another beard so if you're making something where this is a very unique strain like we just harvested the yeast which i'll put that video down in the video description you could reuse this bell's yeast which is uh imperial a62 into another beer so what you'd want to do is get as much beer off of this and then you could pour that into a mason jar and reuse that yeast and just by pouring the whole true into the next beer i'm going to do a video on that again so everybody can see what that what that's like but in this case we're not going to be saving it so i'm just going to get as much of the beer out as possible and then we're just going to discard the rest of it but uh but reusing yeast is a is something that breweries do all the time and a lot of times they do exactly that they save this bottom tube they decant off some of the beer and then they just dump the whole thing into the next batch so they don't wash it they don't rinse the yeast anything like that they'll just dump it in so that's very common for this fault especially smaller craft breweries to do that so as we get going down i'm going to move this racking cane down just a little bit into the beer again if even if it sets on the bottom it's got a little bit of a nozzle at the end so it won't get into the troop too much but we want to just very gently set it on top of it and it's still going to be pulling the beer from on top instead of sucking from the bottom i'm going to let this uh decant or excuse me transfer down and as we get to the the end here uh i'll zoom in and show you kind of how i tilt the container a little bit to get every last bit all right we're getting down to the last couple of inches of the beer you can tell that the racking cane is still down there it's still kind of touching that bottom layer of sediment at the bottom what i'm going to do is it gets a little bit closer to where that would stop eventually i'm going to tilt this just a little bit sideways so that the remaining little bit of beer can be sucked out but again we're not trying to suck off the sediment that's both on the top or uh that is on the bottom of this so we're just going to gently tilt this what i like to do is just put one hand underneath one side of it like this to tilt it gently and that brings more volume to the side of my racking cane which it which is hard to see on the video but it's kind of going diagonally down to this corner and so i'm just going to put my hand gently down there to give it a little bit of angle and then as the beer kind of empties out of the vessel here i'm going to raise my hand underneath underneath this just a little bit until we get the last little bit of beer out of there and again we're not going to try to get every last drop because that's going to start sucking in some of that sediment and some of the trouble on the bottom but this does help you get another about glass bowl or bottle full of beer out of it and you'll in the secondary you'll also have some sediment on the bottom of your secondary vessel so if you suck up a little bit of the tube or a little bit of the top layer that's no big deal you'll be able to clean that out with our secondary vessel so all right we're getting back down it's probably about halfway the volume and i'm going to go ahead and just pull this up and that is going to stop the uh the suction from our racking cane and i'm going to set it back down in here and i'm going to pull this out gently so again it doesn't introduce a bunch of air and just put this thing right in there and then we'll just have to clean this with our pbw or oxiclean in my case i use that and what we have left is our clear beer without the tube and without the sediment in this vessel and so what we're going to do is we're going to put on our lid all right we're going to go ahead and put our lid on top of our secondary and then go ahead and put our airlock on here in this case it's a bung with the s-shaped airlock and go ahead and fit that in there snugly for this particular vessel i have a harness on the top and this harness also has like a lid protector of that protector i guess uh it just kind of keeps it from if there's an active fermentation it helps it so it doesn't uh push the lid off so it has a lid holder on it for the big mouth bubbler i'm gonna go ahead and lock that up okay so this is done and we're gonna go ahead and next put this back into my fermentation chamber which is behind us it's an old cooler that i've converted and has a temperature controller on it you saw that in my brew day video i'm going to go ahead and put this in here and this is going to be about a week and then we will show you how to take that hydrometer reading and a lot of times i would do that ahead of time to see where i'm at before i transfer this in the secondary but i i noticed that this was been completed for a couple of days now and it was ready to move into the secondary regardless but we'll take and show you how to do that hydrometer reading next all right so we got our cylinder sample full of beer that we just transferred to our secondary and this is going to be how to take a hydrometer reading in this case we're going to be using our cylinder that we filled up with beer and just our standard hydrometer again when we did our how to brew day we used a refractometer and since this has alcohol present the hydrometer is going to be better there is a calculator you can do online if you have a refractometer and do it that way but this is obviously more accurate to use the hydrometer so we're going to go ahead we're just going to give this a little spin as we don't get into the beer and then we're going to get a reading on the hydrometer about where our final gravity is in final gravity meaning we're done with fermentation it is going into a secondary and it isn't uncommon to have it drop a point during secondary fermentation but that's unlikely depends how much yeast that you have really got suspended in your beer and if it starts fermenting again if you had fruit or something like that in the secondary it is an uncommon to start fermenting you know rapidly even again depending on how much sugar is present but um most of the yeast would have been in that uh troop on the bottom and we shouldn't have to worry about that so right now i'm getting a hydrometer reading we're just going to give it another spin of about 1.0 either one zero or zero nine so 1009 or 10 10 that's a little bit below what our target was i'm just going to go ahead and give this a quick spin and dunk again to get the air bubbles off and make sure it's not floating anywhere our uh our sheet that we have from bell's brewery said that our final gravity target should be about uh 10 12 or 1.012 final gravity target we're actually a little bit below that so we're going to be having a little bit higher abv on this one so really took off in fermentation and so that's we were a little bit higher to be expected in our uh um starting gravity yeah it's definitely below definitely below 1.010 so it's actually more like 1009 so 1.009 um at this reading and so we'll go ahead and mark that on our brew day sheet for the racking into the secondary so i'm going to go ahead and mark that now today is the 18th i'm going to pull 1.009 and that should actually help us get to the abv and that can be done using a calculator online there's a lot of different calculators you can do the abv calculator and google and you'll come up with a whole bunch of them but you put in your starting gravity which in our case was 1.05 and then you put your final gravity and that is 1.009 and it should come out with the correct abv for this beer so i'll post what that looks like on the video here so you can tell what our abv ended up being for this beer and then we will do another video showing you how to rack into the serving chamber which in this case will be a keg or into a bottling bucket so you can go ahead and do your bottling process and that will be the next video so racking from secondary into your serving vessel or bottling bucket one thing i always do at this level is go ahead and just give it a little sample and if it's good after the primary it's even going to be better after the secondary and conditioning period right now it's warm it's uncarbonated but if it's got a good flavor it's pretty much going to be a good beer when it gets done so you'll be able to tell if there's any really off flavors in this as well so we're going to go ahead and give her a sand yeah i think that's going to be a solid beard so with that we'll be back with the next video on racking to the either keg or bottling bucket to finish up the racking and going from secondary to the final vessel please don't forget to like subscribe and share that helps you see future videos that we do and teaching you how to brew better beer so with that thanks and we'll see you next time

Channel: Cityscape Brewing

Views: 5,503

Keywords: Secondary Fermentation, racking, All Grain, Beer, Brewing, Home Brew, Homebrewing, How to Brew, Learn to Brew, Make Beer, make beer, how to make beer, brewing for beginners, making beer, fermenter, fermentation, home brewing, all grain brewing, Brewing equipment, brewing kits, extract brewing, homebrewing, Homebrew, learn to homebrew, learn to make beer, learn to brew beer, brew equipment, brew kettle, brew pot, brew day, brewing starter kit, bottling beer, bottle beer

Id: w-qpwjBZELU

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021