First Big Brew: Need Help With Fermentation Timing

“…to amount of time it needs to spend in the primary before racking and dry-hopping.”

My first advice is that there is absolutely no need to rack to a secondary for dry hopping. Dry hopping in the primary is perfectly acceptable and is in fact a better practice than transferring to a secondary since it mitigates infection and oxidation concerns.

When you want to add the dry hops to the primary is your choice but I personally recommend you do this when outgassing through the airlock has stopped.

Cheers!

 

In addition to Jack's most excellent advice ...

Ferment two full weeks.
Add dry hops for another week.
Rack to bottling bucket.
Package.

 

This article does a pretty good job of explaining what's going on in your primary:
http://www.morebeer.com/articles/conditioning

 

The discontinuance of using a secondary fermentation container is a fairly new accepted practice, so you'll still see brewing procedures that say to do it. But by doing it you expose your beer during the transfer to oxidation or potential bugs that can cause infection. The times where a secondary container is recommended are when you are going to age the beer on oak spirals, chips, etc, or aging on fruit before packaging.

To address your earlier question about how long to ferment, you've got a pretty big beer here, and it may not go as quickly as what a calendar says it will. I suggest that you watch the progress and when you think it is done, take a gravity reading. Then take another one a few days later, and if there is no further drop in the read, the beer is done. The more time that you can give the beer after that point to allow the yeast to clean up the beer a little bit will be beneficial. An extra week is usually an ideal period of time.

One other note to add: since this is a big beer, you can have a lot of krausening activity that could spill outside of your air lock if that is what you are using. I suggest that you use a blow-off tube until after the most active part of the fermentation, or until the end if you want.

 

Definitely attach that blow off tube! You will come home to a lid somewhere on the ground and krausen on the ceiling if you let that one go with just an airlock.

But yea, what everyone else has said on primary vs. secondary. I'd just let it sit on that yeast cake for 1 month, and then bottle it straight off the primary. Add the hops about 1 week or so after fermentation activity has subsided.