Racking to the Secondary

After 11 days fermenting, I decided to rack (move) the Pale Ale over to a smaller carboy for clearing and conditioning. It had a vigorous and fairly lengthy fermentation and could probably use another week or two to let the yeast clean up the beer a bit. While I could have done that in the primary, I need the larger carboy for this weekend's brew and had an hour to spare today.

The name of the game in brewing is sanitation. So the first thing I did was fill a bucket full of warm water, added some star-san and threw everything I was going to need into it.

I moved the pale ale from his bath-tub resting place and put him on the kitchen counter. I placed a newly clean and sanitized 5 gallon carboy onto a bucket directly below. I put two wedges underneath the Ale to help get more of the beer and less of the yeast. The ale ended up a really nice copper color. A little darker than I wanted, but still quite nice. The hop aroma was almost overpowering, the entire upper section of the carboy was coated in remnants of the hop pellets. The ferment was vigorous indeed! I thiefed a sample and took a hydrometer reading. 1.012. Spot on! As per usual, I quaffed the sample down. Wooo! Those hops are strong yet. A couple more weeks and they will fade quite a bit and hopefully leave me with a nice balanced beer. Still, aside from a strong hop flavor, the brew is quite clean. No unusual flavors. Bodes well.

I used my autosiphon to start the transfer to the secondary. This is a handy tool, has a small tip that allows it to sit a small bit from the bottom and avoid much of the trub. While I want some yeast to come along with the beer, I don't need the whole of it. Just a few to clean it up a bit, and of course to carbonate once we get to the bottles.

The transfer takes about 20 minutes, it gets quite slow at the end. But slow is better. I want to avoid any unnecessary splashing that might add oxygen to the beer. Nobody likes beer that tastes like cardboard.

Eventually I get it all transferred over. I'll place it back into the bath-tub and let it rest another week or two at 65 degrees. The into the bottles.

By the way, for anyone that uses glass carboys I highly recommend the brew hauler that you see on my carboys. 5 gallons of liquid is heavy and glass is quite slippery when wet. The last thing I want to do is drop a 5 gallon jug of beer on my foot. Messy and dangerous.

Well, that's all done! Beer is safely in it's new home and ready to be left alone for aging.

Now unfortunately, I have some cleaning to do.