Why not secondary?

[Ozbrewer]

Ill have to agreeable disagree here......

While i dont bother with 2ndry anymore (actually its not a 2ndry fermentation, the beer ios fermented, its now clearing) I have a good fermenting system that allows me to keep the finished beer in the fermenter and then crash it down to 2 deg c pretty easy...then its straight into the keg...but when i was bottling i would rack it off into a cube and sit it in the cool room for a week or so befoire bottling.....this was done for a few reasons, mostly because i hated bottling and ill leave it untill i have 4-5 batches to bottle and spend a day at it, The result was a cleaner crisper beer with less crap in the bottle

I did have some trub settle at the bottom of my bottles...but...it's homebrew, so i did not really care.

thats the difference between homebrew, and great home crafted beer. Buy not leting the crap settle out, you may find that different bottle will taste different, a bottle with more trub may be differnet to a bottle taken before or after...

One drawback, is that any time you rack your beer there is a chance for infection.

thats tru if you dont sanitize the container, hoses bla bla bla


IN short, if you can clear the beer in the fermenter and keep it kewel do so, if not i would rack of and let it clear and cool alittle

[Speyedr]

I think it would also depend on the what is in the trub. The trub will breakdown over time, so if you have a lot of hop mass in there and break material, and you didn't recirculate so you have grain pieces, etc. this will ALL breakdown. If it gets into the bottles it will conrinue to breakdown and the beer will suffer.

If you are going to bottle it and drink it right up within a few weeks I wouldn't worry about it much (although I would STILL secondary myself). But if you are going to age the beer for any decent amount of time, you'd better be damn sure you don't get any trub or break material into your bottles.

Frankly, I find it MUCH easier to keep my equipment and my beer sanitary than to keep ALL of the material in the primary when I rack. I go Primary, Secondary, and then Keg or bottle, always. But that's just me.

Like Charlie says, "If you can brew, you can sanitize" - or something like that.

[joques]

I've never secondaried in my life, and since I started brewing three years ago I've won gold medals every year in the national championships. Some of them have sat in bottles for a long time, for instance a British Old Ale that I bottled a year ago and which won silver at the nationals this weekend.

Granted, there is a lot less competition in Norway; this year there were 68 beers in total at the championship, so make of that what you will

I think you'd have to really try to get any trub in your bottles. The trub falls out and is covered by yeast during fermentation. What you get in the bottles is just yeast, as far as I can tell.

[BigBadBrad]

I have to agree with Joques, if you are getting trub in your bottles, you have bigger problems than deciding whether or not to do a secondary. The only sediment in your bottles should be yeast

That being said, I don't secondary anything anymore. Not even lagers. I will rack the lagers off the trub before pitching, but I leave the beer on the yeast for at least 6 weeks for lagers and 2 two weeks for ales. I then rack directly to the keg and have very clear (and award winning) beer.

Brad

[newbiebrew]

I don't see much of a need to secondary with ales because as stated before, if your worried about trub in your beer you can just give it an extra few day to totally settle to the bottom, but I have read in a number of places that if you are planning to leave a beer in your fermenter for anywhere over 3 weeks(i.e. a lager) then it is a good idea to rack the beer off the trub and into a secondary becasue you run the risk of extracting some undesireable flavors from the trub, but again this is just what I've read and is not something I've learned through experience being as i have never brewed a lager.