What's the maximum amount of time for primary fermentation, assuming the beer is going straight to bottles next? Will it over ferment and then fail to carbonate, if left too long in a carboy?
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It takes three to nine days for yeast to ferment a typical wort. After yeast consumes all the available food (or produces too much toxic alcohol) it goes into a dormant stage, flocculates and drops out of suspension. At this point it does not produce alcohol or CO2. Priming sugar is used to give the yeast a little more fuel so they will wake up and carbonate the bottle. This means that you can not over-ferment your beer. I do not transfer my beer from primary. You can leave them for months with little flavor impact. |
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Best sanitation practices and healthy yeast let my beers sit in primary for many months. As I tend to over pitch, the extra time is not wasted by our single cell friends. Crystal clear (I stopped using secondaries some years back) and no off flavors. Sorry, I don't know how this would affect bottling as I haven't done that in over 30 years. Agree, great yeast is out there, grow it up if need be before pitching. Or just get a growler full of it from from your local micro-brewery. |
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If you're using a fresh yeast is should be fine. If you're reusing yeast in the carboy and you're on your third cycle and you leave your beer in the primary on a huge 4 month old cow pie then you're certainly risking some off trooby flavors. |
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I had one batch in the primary for about 3 months and it turned out great. I was worried something "wrong" would happen but everything tasted great with no off flavors or anything out of the ordinary. |
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I left a cider in primary for 1 year... it turned out dry, crisp, and tart. Definitely no autolysis, socks, meat flavors there, nothing for it to hide behind. |
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I have had mine in there for 3 weeks probably max. I tend to follow the 1-2-3 rule and that's 1 in the primary - 2 in the secondary and 3 in the bottles. The yeast don't "die" they just go dormant so when you add some fuel (ie sugar) they will get active again until they have burned that up and thus carbonate the beer. The only real reason I even move to a secondary is out of probably an unfounded fear of off flavors from the beer sitting on all those proteins etc, but to be honest it's probably not really necessary. It's more of me just wanting to mess with it and not having the patience to leave it alone for 2-3 weeks haha. |
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I've read where there is a risk of adding some off flavors if you let your beer sit in the primary fermenter too long. Typically when you see that there isn't any bubbling or activity for a day then consider racking to a secondary or going to the bottling bucket and add priming sugar. Or if you don't want to worry about bottle conditioning, consider kegging your beer and force CO2 into it. No worries about carbonation then. |
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I've had beers in the primary bucket for as long as a 5 weeks (busy, lazy, whatever), and never had a carbonation problem in bottles or kegs, upon addition of priming sugar. There will always be live yeast hanging around. Never had real problems with off-flavors from sitting on the trub for too long either. I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules, but I do try to get it into the secondary in 1-2 weeks, if it's a big beer. For a regular session beer, it goes to bottling/kegging after 4-5 days anyway, as soon as fermentation is done. |
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