I’m ready to do a secondary fermentation of my all-grain Bavarian style lager. Starting specific gravity (SG) was 1.042. After 14 days it’s 1.010, which it’s been for a couple of days. Is it safe to siphon into secondary fermentation vessel now or do you think the SG is going to fall any more? The primary fermentation was carried out at 50 deg F +/- 2-3 degrees. Your help would be appreciated
You are safe to rack to the secondary at this point, but you don’t have to do any secondary conditioning - I just leave it in primary for a month then keg, chill, charge and serve after a couple weeks. The use of the term “secondary fermentation” is confusing, because most people use it to mean conditioning in a second vessel to remove it from the yeast cake in the primary fermenter. Really, “secondary fermentation” is an actual fermentation process after adding something after primary fermentation is complete or after racking during the primary fermentation where the terminal gravity has not been reached.
Your lager will do well with either approach, I am sure, it has just become an unnecessary step to most folks here at the Forum, but I know some still move their beer off the primary yeast cake as a matter of standard operating procedure.
Best of luck.
:cheers:
