Secondary Fermentation

One week into our American Pale Ale fermentation, we racked the beerski from our fermentation bucket into a carboy. Supposedly, this leads to a clearer beer and an easier to clean carboy. The process of getting the beer into the new vessel is similar to that of bottling or kegging. You basically have to siphon the beer out without disturbing the gunk at the bottom of the vessel. But you also have to make sure everything stays sanitary. You fill the siphon pipe with sanitizer then put one end in the primary fermenter. Then you start letting the sanitizer flow out into a spare bucket and via gravity and pressure the beer in the primary fermenter follows and flows out the tubes. Once the liquid is no longer clear, you can move the exit end of the tubing into the secondary fermenter.  Here is what our set up looked like post-transfer:

Into the secondary fermenter!

 We completed this process the Sunday that we got home from the beach for Easter. While we were there, we broke off from the family for a little while to check out the local Wilmington homebrew shops. The first one, Nocci Boca (or something like that), was a winery that seemed to want to cash in on an unfilled niche in the area. They didn't seem all that knowledgeable and their prices were really high.

Then, we went to Wilmington Home Brew and found a store much more to our liking. The staff was super knowledgeable and friendly. It definitely had a homey, welcoming feel and actually looked like a brew shop with barrels of grains and shelves of equipment. They were also doing a free tasting, which, of course we loved.

The kegging expert there explained the kegging process to Landon a bit more clearly than what we'd found on the internet thus far. There seems to be a lack of information on the kegging process online because new brewers tend to bottle exclusively and experienced brewers know what to do already. The gist of what he told us was that after secondary fermentation, we could keg imediately and drink our beer the following day. But, more on that next time.