Brewed the 1 gal extract kit of Chinook IPA recently. The small batch directions dont call for a secondary, but the five gal kit does. There were a lot of hops, so I decided secondary would be a good idea and racked it over after 2 weeks in primary. Its now been in secondary for a week. How long should I leave it before bottling?
Since it’s just a one-gal batch you probably don’t want to take too many gravity readings, right? Take one reading now and another in ~3 days and if they match, bottle it.
Thanks. Good to know.
Bottled the IPA tonight. It never got down to where I was hoping. It had stalled at 1.028 (OG was 1.056). It tasted really sweet and weird. We’ll see what happens after the 2 weeks bottle conditioning, but I don’t have high hopes for this batch. I’ve had a string of bad batches lately. I picked up two new 5 gal batches at NB this week that I plan on doing in the next few days, I don’t want to waste the time/effort/money on those if I can’t get this thing down right. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on, watched every video I can find, and still have had some poor brews.
It sounds like you bottled it before it was done. Best case, the yeast pooped out on you and you’ll end up with overly sweet, flat beer. Worst case, the yeast will get going again and you’ll have bottle bombs. Consider putting those bottles in a plastic tote or something similar that will contain the blast of beer and broken glass if they do explode from overcarbonation.
In your OP you said you racked it to secondary so I assumed you had already checked the gravity - you should never rack the beer off the yeast cake until you have reached the desired FG or you will never get it to finish out. If you’d like to post some details of your brewing routine, we can try to spot any weaknesses before you brew again.
One more thing to consider, you mentioned racking to secondary because the 5-gallon batches call for secondary. Many brewers debate the need for transferring beer off the yeast into a secondary vessel. The main reason to transfer is to prevent off flavors from autolysis of dead yeast; in a 5- gallon batch this is really low risk. Some say the transfer helps the beer clear, others say a transfer just introduces oxidation risk without value. I’m not really the expert on this; I’m just trying to say don’t transfer just because the instruction sheet calls for it.
Did you maybe check the gravity after you added the bottling sugar?
Should’ve just left it in primary. Didn’t check gravity before racking to secondary, then not enough yeast in secondary to help ferment any lower. I’ll chalk it up to beginner brewer error.
