Every submariner who’s been on a boat for a month or two knows one thing: Who’s the next NEW guy onboard…
The new guy, who’s gotta pound the tech manuals and struggle to learn what it takes to be on a submarine…
Something about seeing someone else go through something we’ve been through calls us to take on the role of a mentor… and we seem to get a lot of satisfaction out of helping others…
That’s why I like getting emails that remind me what it was like when I first started brewing… when I wanted to quickly become an expert brewer… when I had no idea how much I needed to learn…
When I used to ask the wrong questions…
… and this week I was reminded about my beginnings with this question: “How Long Should I Leave My Beer In The 1st Fermentor?”…
… and boy, I wish the answer could be as simple as 3 weeks or something like that… but there are countless factors that makes the answer vary from 5 days to 30+ days…
The most common reason to leave a beer sitting longer is to clean up any esters or byproducts and off flavors yeast produce during fermentation… but this leads to other questions: did the yeast produce many by-products or esters during fermentation?… are esters part of the beer style being brewed?… and other questions can probably spawn out of those…
The last question is probably the better question to ask… because then you can adapt everything else depending on the answer to that question…
If you want esters then leaving your beer in the primary fermentor for a shorter time is probably better, but if you want to clean up the esters then longer time is better…
…. but then other things come into play….
What temperature are you fermenting at?
If you are fermenting at lower temperatures, then chances are few esters are being produced…. if you ferment at higher temperatures then more esters will probably be produced, so you’ll have to gauge how estery your beer should be if at all…
but then we have to take into account how much yeast was pitched… the more yeast you pitch, the fewer esters you’ll see in your beer… but that depends on the yeast strain…
… and it’s not just the yeast strain, what about the size of the beer?
Big beers usually need more time to ferment and clean up… small beers don’t… in fact, Emergency Brews are small for that reason…
… an Emergency Brew is when you need to get from grain to glass in 7 days… the key to brewing a beer and be sipping on it in a week is to brew a small ale… healthy and good yeast amounts, not too warm and not too cool of a fermentation temperature, and well, you also need a keg setup so you can infuse copious amounts of CO2 overnight… which means the beer will probably sit on the primary only for 5 to 6 days!!
but suppose you want to leave it sitting a bit longer… how long can/should you go?
Again so many things to consider… is the yeast viable? did you pitch from a starter or re-hydrate your yeast? Have the yeast been shocked? how much lipids formed during fermentation?…
… and what if you want to re-use the yeast… it’s usually better to re-pitch right after fermentation is complete, which means you’ll have to move the beer to a secondary unless you have a conical fermentor…
So, to answer the question of “How long should you leave your beer in the 1st fermentor?” I will use my favorite home brewing answer: It Depends!
I mean, I haven’t even begun to think about dry-hopping in the primary or adding other spices, or polyphenols or clarity of beer…
Cheers!
