Transferring beer from a primary to a secondary fermenter. Notice the trub sediment.

I was inspired by this thread on Brew Advice to compile my own findings on primary vs. secondary fermentation and when it’s necessary in the home brew process. Our list of equipment started off with a plastic carboy from Better Bottle and a bottling bucket sans lid. Recently, we discovered you can get airtight lids with a port for an airlock and so now we have the capability of fermenting in either container. In fact, a lot of home brewers go straight for the buckets, as they are often cheap, easy to move around, and block out light.

To tackle this issue, first we have to define what happens in primary and secondary fermentation. Primary fermentation is, in essence, when you start to make actual beer. After your wort has cooled and you add it to your fermenter, you pitch in your yeast and seal the container off. Within hours, the yeast start to eat the malt sugars and as a by-product they create alcohol and carbon dioxide. Now you have beer! Most recipes call for a fermentation of 7-14 days or until fermentation activity has slowed to almost nothing.

In our last post, our Dithyrambic Roasted Brown Ale only called for primary fermentation before bottling. Our next planned brew calls for a secondary fermenter. So why the need for another step?

Well back to the primary fermentation, one of the things that happens when the yeast activity starts to die down is suspended particles in your beer start to settle. The little bits and pieces are made up of inactive yeast, hops, proteins, and other by-products of the brew process. All these things fall to the bottom and create a layer of sediment called trub. The problem with trub is that it can start to affect the flavor of your beer after two weeks, (this is arguable, as I’ve seen sources claiming otherwise, but for now I will assume it to be true) and some recipes call for beer to be aged longer then just 14 days, such as those with high alcoholic content like barley wine or lagers which typically ferment at colder temperatures and longer times than ales.

The other reason to move to a second fermenter, besides aging and separating from the trub, are to induce certain flavors to the beer. One of the most popular methods is dry hopping, which involves adding additional hops directly into the beer without boiling. Other ideas are adding fruit, spices, and oils; although technically by adding these extra ingredients you have not made real beer, according to the German Beer Purity Law.

Second fermentation also aids in clarifying beer, which seems to be an issue to the new home brewer. As long as you have properly sanitized everything when transferring to the second fermenter and it is still sealed, you can be in this step almost indefinitely until you are ready to bottle. Our next recipe will require a primary and secondary fermentation process to flavor our beer.

Emptying our carboy.

Our first real attempt at a brew was this recipe straight from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which has served as our guide into this world thus far. This is an Intermediate level recipe in the book, but does not call for any actual grain, instead favoring dark liquid malt extract.

Since Chris had been picking up the supplies at our LBS: The Brooklyn Kitchen; he was lucky enough to catch their in-house home brew expert who talked him into modifying the recipe into a partial mash (a step in brewing between using only malt extracts to going all grain, for those new out there). Unfortunately since we started this blog after this beer was already brewed, I can’t recall the exact recipe (we’re bad brewmasters, but we’re trying!). I do know that our grain mix featured black malt and non-malted roasted barley. We used a mix of both liquid and dry malt extracts.

The brew process was pretty straight-forward. Within 24 hours our carboy was full of activity. We had a blow-off tube for the first five days and then later switched to a three-chamber airlock. After fermenting in our primary container for just over two weeks, we bottled. The photo above is the transfer from our carboy to our bottling bucket. We primed with corn sugar and bottled everything, leaving just enough to sample.

We were both pleased with our first brew. First of all, it tasted like beer. Huge success! No other weird smells, tastes, or anything funky like that. Secondly, it tasted like good beer. The recipe is basically a well-hopped brown ale. My first impression was that it had similar characteristic to Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale. Finally, it had an amazing color. In the carboy it looked pitch black, but when passing it through a tube to the bottling bucket it had more of a translucent brown, like a Coca-Cola on ice. It also seems to have a nice alcoholic content, but we did not have a hydrometer yet to take any readings, so that will remain a mystery for now.

We plan on stopping by the Brooklyn Kitchen this weekend for the first Home Brew Salon. There will be other home brew enthusiasts bringing in samples and maybe even some legit local brewers there. Personally, I’m a little nervous to bring our very first creation to this type of thing, especially because it should really prime for another week, but I’m hoping to gain some insight from the more seasoned brewers there and will bring few by to sample.

We will come back to this beer in the future and report on it’s taste after it’s fully primed. We also have a new brew on the way and this time we fully documented the entire process. Stay tuned.

After a couple initial batches and trips to the LBS, it’s become apparent that we are hooked on home brewing. Inspired by other bloggers and finding that we’re not really good at writing our recipes down, we created this blog to keep track of our creations and make sense of the complex chemistry behind home brewing. We’re hoping we can help anyone who was in our situation just a month ago; new to this world but ready to dive in. Along the way our skills will (hopefully) be honed and we’ll learn a lot from other brewers out there.

So here we are. Let’s talk about beer!