Hi All. I have been brewing for a few years and normally rack my beers to a secondary fermenter before bottling or kegging. It would be less work to transfer from the primary to keg or bottles. However, I don’t want to sacrifice the clarification or quality of the beer I am packaging. My question is… do you feel it is necessary to rack your beer to a secondary fermenter? Why or why not?
Thanks,
Brandon
I personally stopped using secondaries about two years ago, except in cases where I have a specific reason. Those could include dry-hopping, secondary fermentation using fruit or sugar, adding spices or oak, or anything I want to age for more than a couple months. I’m sure you’ll get plenty of opinions on both sides.
No secondary here since I don’t really make fruit beers, and I dry hop right in the primary. I usually add my spices at bottling time ( make an extract with a little vodka and soak the spices for a few days ). Never seem to have issues with clarity. In fact, the comps I’ve entered seem to emphasize the clarity ( too bad the rest of it gets dinged…otherwise I’d look like Mr. T with all the gold medals 
)
Some beers need to age or have additional ingredients as stated above. I feel most beers are just fine or even a little fresher with no 2nd. Clarity is usually an issue of time. Quality has too many other variables besides just time. I always make sure I am to FG before I do anything as I’m sure you know. I say give it a try and see what you think.
Secondary is unnecessary in most low gravity ales.
Necessary? absolutely not. Desirable? could be. You really need to try it both ways and decide for yourself. Brew the exact same beer twice, once with secondary and once without (keep total time the same) and see which you prefer. I’ve done that and prefer to always secondary because I (and competition judges) prefer the result.
You’ll get plenty of opinions both ways in this thread so you really need to decide for yourself.
I use them because I only bottle and I don’t always feel like bottling. Secondary is quick and easy.
I rack all my finished beers to a keg and secondary until I am ready to place on service or bottle. This may be for a few weeks, months or years depending on the beer/wine/cider/mead.
From a quality perspective, secondary isn’t necessary. There have been more than a couple of experiments to demonstrate that having your beer sit on your yeast cake and trub for a few weeks isn’t going to leave much in the way of off flavors. The main one I can think of off the top of my head is the collaboration between homebrew radio and BYO magazine.
However, more often than not I do transfer to secondary, as I find that kegging from secondary tends to suck up less sediment from my carboy, leaving less sediment in the keg in case it needs to travel, which it often does. Also, I tend to repitch the yeast from primary onto my next batch of beer, and the yeast is less viable after it’s been sitting in its own waste (alcohol) for a few weeks, and I also need my only two 6g carboys again for that batch.
Now with that said, transferring to secondary runs the risk of introducing oxygen into your beer leading to off flavors, but also kicking off a secondary fermentation if your wort wasn’t sufficiently oxygenated initially, and depending on the gravity and style of beer, this might be a good thing. But I purge the 5g carboys that I transfer into with some co2 to minimize oxygenation and seems to work well.
I decide on a brew by brew basis. Sometimes a beer just isn’t clearing the way I’d like after a few weeks in primary. In those cases, if I rack to secondary it seems to get it to clear better. Maybe the physical agitation, I don’t know. If I want to dry hop before kegging (unusual, I usually dry hop in the keg), or do a cold conditioning, I’ll rack to secondary. I prefer not to have to do a secondary, but I let the beer make the decision for me.
I’m with Denny on letting the beer decide. I do find that I rarely need a secondary.
Fred
I don’t secondary very often, I usually use the keg as a secondary. I do rack to a carboy to secondary for higher gravity beers that I’m going to age for awhile and beers that I dry hop
I used to reside in the no-secondary camp, but now I’m with Denny and Fred on letting the beer decide. I think it depends a lot on the flocculation properties of the yeast. Stubborn lager strains usually need some chill time in a secondary to clarify, or else can taste yeasty and very un-lager-like.
Are we talking here about finishing fermenting in secondary fermenter or are we talking about transferring fully fermented beer to another vessel for flocculating and clarification?
These are two different things.
In general, don’t you never want to transfer out of primary until fermentation is done, whether to a secondary or not?
In my case, I consider it to be the latter.
I used to secondary all of my beers religiously until I discovered that it really wasn’t necessary for most beers. Yeah a Barleywine or a big beer would benefit by a secondary for aging and clarification purposes, but your typical ales don’t really benefit from a secondary. I rack from the primary right into the keg for most of my beers.
Lately my secondary is straight to cold crash.
Thanks for all the replies. I wait until fermentation is complete before transferring to secondary. I have been using a secondary fermenter for the purpose of clearing my beer. I have done a couple of fruit beers that I transferred to secondary on top of some fruit puree. It definitely sounds like most people are not using a secondary except in a few cases ( ie fruit beers ). I think I will follow the advice “let the beer decide”.
Another question that goes along with this is… If you bottle your beers, do you transfer to a bottling bucket before adding the priming sugar? Or do you have another method of adding the priming sugar to the finished beer? Thanks again for the guidance.
Brandon
Yep. I don’t want anything that’s settled to the bottom of the fermenter stirred up when I add the sugar.