I am almost ready to move an oatmeal raisin stout into the secondary, following a basic recipe kit but adding ingredients I found for another recipe. Right now I have, as suggested, the raisins, cinnamon sticks, and vanilla beans sitting in bourbon. However, the recipe states beer should be “racked onto” the ingredients. Im new to this and confused at what its saying. Am I just throwing this into the secondary or am I washing the beer over this mixture?
I would like to think that I should let these sit in the secondary to bring out the flavor, but im just not sure on the lingo.
Rack onto means the additional ingredients are already in the fermenter ahead of racking. This is to account for displacement. When using secondary you want to fill all the way to the neck, so adding stuff after could cause overflow.
Awesome. Thank you. I figured as much, just wanted to make sure. What seems like a good length of time considering its sitting with those ingredients and bourbon?
Be sure to purge the vessel with CO2 first and avoid splashing during the transfer to help your beer age better.
And remember that its most important that your fermentation is already complete in the primary. There are old directions that basically say to rack after only a week. Give the beer the time it needs to finish up, then rack it to the new vessel over the top of the spices.
I’m not sure about all of this. This is a true secondary fermentation IMO because of the sugar in the raisins which will put out some CO2. I don’t think it needs to be up to the neck because of the co2 and at any rate there may or may not be enough beer to fill to the neck after racking off the trub. If you do fill to the neck, or close to it, you need a blow off tube.
Also, to the comment that they should purge with CO2, most new brewers can’t do this and with a sugar source in the 2nd carboy that’s OK.
Also, an alternative is to simply add the ingredients to the primary fermenter as it winds down. You will then want to rack very carefully into the bottling bucket when the time comes.
If there are enough to have a flavor impact they should be. I cup has about 100g of sugar. Regardless, I wouldn’t be surprised if the carboy can’t be filled to the neck. Maybe adding to primary is best.
Correct, i dont have any co2 source. The time to move into secondary is drawing near. The goodies have been soaking in the bourbon since Sunday. Looking at the fermenter last night it looks like a gallon with of trubb sitting on the bottom, far above the collector and valve.
When I siphon the beer to the secondary carboy, I imagine that it will be 4 gallons and very thick considering the molasses and cocoa powder I used at the end of the boil. So should I add boiled clean water to top it off to make a total 5 gallons? And how would that affect the FG?
I can post the full recipe when I get home if that helps answer questions.
I’ll make a couple of points that I think will be helpful in the future, crummydo.
You mentioned topping off with water, in part, because you expect the beer to be “thick” because of molasses and cocoa powder. Actually it won’t because the molasses is just about all sugar which will all be fermented into alcohol which will actually be thinner and make the beer taste drier and the cocoa will just give off flavor and the rest will be trub.
You also mentioned adding extra water at the beginning so you can fill the secondary carboy to the top.
Two things:
You don’t need to rack into a carboy in most cases. You usually can just let it finish in the primary fermenter. Racking into the secondary is usually done when you are adding fermentables like fruit. Some also do it onto hops and other ingredients. I personally only do it when there will be additional fermentables.
Also, adding extra water will give you watered down beer unless you add more malt or extract.
I see what you’re saying. Makes sense. This is only my 6th batch I think, so I am still learning. All this is very helpful and I really appreciate it guys.
So as it happened, last night I finally “racked onto” the raisins, cinnamon, and vanilla. I used a bottling bucket with a false bottom to keep all that from bothering with the flow when I get ready to keg or bottle. I of course took a sample which is already sitting at 8.6% abv according to my math (woohoo), and gave it a little taste.
Very dry without much of a stout taste. It very much reminds me of a taste of a pils thats was left sitting out after a party all night. I know that adding in those other ingredients in the secondary will give it more character and flavor, but would adding a dry hop in a few weeks hurt it? I mean I know the stout style isn’t one that usually has dry hopping, but I just feel that its missing some. I only used fuggles in the boil and I didn’t think that was enough at the time, but its what the recipe called for.
Im thinking about adding either Kent Golding, Fuggles, or Tettnang for dry hopping. Thoughts?
Don’t be too quick to judge the taste before it’s carbonated. Higher alcohol brews always seem to change a bit (for the better) overtime for me. On the dry hopping, I tend not to dry hop stouts because I don’t want the hops to overwhelm the roast, but if I was going to light dry hop I’d go Kent Golding’s.
That’s what I assumed. It didn’t taste bad, but the flavor had changed from post boil. Before going in the fermenter it tasted no shit like hot chocolate.
Also the trubb wasnt as much as I thought it would be but damn was it thick! The beer in actuality felt TOO thin. Stark contrast from what I thought it would be.