Is Secondary Fermentation Really Necessary?
Rack to a sencondary is a common instruction found in some recipes floating around the web and even some books and magazines..
. since moving the beer can lead to an infection, oxidized beer or just loss of beer during the transfer, the question I asked myself a while ago was "Is secondary fermentation really necessary?"...
Well, first off, let me start by defining secondary fermentation... this is a term normally used to describe transferring beer from one fermenting vessel to another and leave it sitting a while before bottling or kegging.
In other words secondary usually refers to the other vessel where the beer is transfered to. This is usually done for clarification purposes which is supposed to be the main advantage of racking the beer to a secondary...
Is it really necessary though?...
Not really... I guess it depends... fermentation basically consists of 3 phases... the first phase is when the yeast are introduced to their new home (the wort). The second phase is when the yeast start to eat up the sugar, meaning ferment the beer (called attenuation). The third phase is the conditioning phase, which is when the yeast clean up their by-products...
All three of these phases happen regardless of whether you rack to a secondary or not. In fact, when you rack to a secondary you are removing the beer from the active yeast cake which now makes you rely on the least flocculant yeast (less active) to clean up the beer... You do clarify the beer (taking haze away from it), but you do it at the expense of potentially not conditioning the beer as well...
It is actually becoming a better practice to leave the beer in one fermenting vessel for longer periods of time instead of racking to a secondary... The longer time makes more yeast flocculate and that clarifies the beer as well...
So when is secondary a good thing?
Racking to a secondary can actually be necessary for some styles or depending on how long you want to condition your beer. If you are planning on leaving your beer sitting for a while before bottling, then it is a good idea to remove the beer from the yeast cake after4 or 6 weeks to avoid autolysis (rare, but potential), or avoid proteins from breaking down.
Beer usually improves with time, with the exception of some styles like Hefeweizens and such so there is no need to worry about the 'freshness' of beer as some macro-brewers promote. These are just a couple more
things you may want to know about beer.
Something else you may want to know about fermentation is airlock activity. You will usually not see any airlock activity when you move your beer to a secondary since most of the CO2 has already been produced and not much more will be produced (if any) when you rack to a secondary...
With that being said, you shouldn't rack your beer to a secondary or even bottle until fermentation is complete. By fermentation, I am referring to attenuation. If attenuation is not complete, that can lead to a couple potential problems...
If the yeast can not attenuate anymore, then you may have underpitched your yeast or perhaps did not provide enough oxygen to allow the yeast to adapt, grow and reproduce. More than likely though, most brewers who don't fully attenuate their beers, usually just had a drop in temperature which made their yeast flocculate and drop to the bottom.
If that is the case, then it is likely to re-activate the yeast by raising the temperature back to where it was and perhaps stirring the beer lightly. This is why you want to make sure your fermentation is complete before you rack your beer, because if you rack to a secondary and you remove the beer from the yeast cake then you won't exactly finish attenuating your beer since most of the active yeast will be on the yeast cake...
If you bottle before you finish attenuation, then you run the risk of activating the yeast when they are in the bottle and that will produce more CO2 than you want, which is the primary cause of bottles exploding...
I think that about covers what I know about secondary fermenters...
Is Secondary Fermentation Really Necessary?
By: Jorge
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