jrodie wrote:What I personally have been doing lately to decide when to move to the next step is to wait until the top of the fermenting beer looks completely "glassy"...The surface of the beer usually looks glassy after about 8-12 weeks.
Hey there jr
,
Be very careful of what you read on forums. "Letting the ale decide when it is ready," is probably about a s bad advice as it gets. For goodness sakes!
Imagine if a commercial or micro-brewery said that? It's just ridiculous. And 8-12 weeks is way too long to have your beer in a fermentor. A lot can go wrong doing that. You can actually ferment a barley wine completely in probably three weeks despite what you'll read on forums.
There is so much info we need to look at here. Ale or lager yeast for a start. Fermentation temperature secondly. Yeast variety next and then beer style (mainly to know the original gravity) last. For example, with an ale, using Nottingham, the damn beer is nearly fully fermented by the time you finish sprinkling the yeast in
.
...
So, experienced brewers must be careful to give specific advice to new brewers and new brewers need to ignore advice that is not specific enough.
As a general rule
We home brewers do not have the time demands placed on us that a commercial brewery does. We do not have to rush our beers through fermentation and package them the second they have finished fermenting so I reckon...
If you were brewing an ale and fermenting it at 18 C, then two weeks of fermentation would be fine, regardless of yeast used. (This is actually more time than you need so don't go adding yet another week
).
If you were brewing a lager and fermenting it at 9 C, then three weeks of fermetaion would be fine, regardless of yeast used. (Once again, this is actually more time than you need so don't go adding yet another week
).
Conditioning versus Fermenting
These are two different things. Yeast continues to work for ages but it is working on different things. Once your beer is fermented, your main aim should be to package and carbonate it and the way you should do this very much depends on your package (bottles/kegs) and your equipment (eg filter/temperature control).
When Starting Out
It's all very well for experienced brewers to write paragraphs like, 'As a general rule,' as I have done above but there is no way I can guess or know your own individual recipe, set-up, yeast, climate etc, etc. So, my advice above might be wrong for you. I'm about 99% sure it won't be but...
The main thing you will be worried about is knowing when your beer has stopped fermenting. As a beginner you are going to want to be taking samples from the fermentor tap. When you think things have settled down in the fermentor and this will be at least a few days after pitching, even with a vigorous ale yeast, take your sample and drop your hydrometer in. Make sure you take the sample after high krausen. No, hold on, take it a bit before high krausen ans then you will know why I said to take it after high krausen
.
What I am trying to say is that if you have a decent hydromerter jar, not a narrow, crappy plastic one but rather a wider diameter one, you will be able to have your pitched wort in that and it will be a microcosm of your fermentor, especially if you keep it beside (or at the same temperature) as your fementor and covered of course.
Doing the above means that you don't have to take sample after sample to see when the final gravity stabilises. And, it will give you the confidence to, later on say, "I know that with pretty much all my recipes, the yeasts I use and the temp I ferment at that I can package with this method after
x days.
Good question jr
. No more 8-12 weeks fermenting though. My old agricultural college motto was, "We're not here for a long time. We're here for a good time." Take heed.
PP
If you have found
the above or anything else of value on BIABrewer.info, consider supporting us by
getting some BIPs!
