Question about Primary Fermentation

First question is what are trying to accomplish with dropping the yeast out?

I believe most people don’t use a secondary unless they are doing a secondary fermentation such adding fruit, dry hopping (many people dry hop in the primary like myself) etc. doing a secondary fermentation just because doesn’t accomplish anything. Just let the beer condition as is. I wouldn’t drop the yeast. Also, if brewing a big beer like an imperial stout I would wait like a month before doing anything. Big beers take awhile to finish completely out.

Lastly, an ambient temp of 70 seems high for a big beer and that yeast strain. That high of temp the yeast will give a lot of fruity esters and possibly fusel alcohol. Bigger the beer the more active fermentation will be, so when you say the temp is 70. Are you referring to ambient or does your fermenter have a temp control? If the ambient temp is 70 the fermenter could be mid 70s due to the active fermentation.

 

Sure, you should be cautious about oxygen, but I think a bigger concern is your plan to drain the yeast cake in 2 weeks. Until you know your way around the yeast you are using and the challenges you are throwing at it, I caution against such prescribed timelines. You don't want to remove a beer from the yeast until you know yeast activity is completed. For me, that means doing gravity checks and tasting hydrometer samples. Consecutive gravity checks over a couple days, with zero change in gravity, and no off flavors in either sample, should be a good indicator that your beer is finished. And really, there is no need to hurry. The window between your beer being finished and dying yeast creating off flavors is months long.

 

Welcome to the BA site, BadHuggyBear, and to the Homebrewing forum. You've found a great place to get help when brewing, and you received some great advice above. I'll only add that you shouldn't even take a hydrometer reading until the two-week mark since this is a big beer. Good luck on getting it to finish up tour satisfaction. Is this a batch that is larger than one gallon and that you can afford multiple samples and readings until it's done? Otherwise stretch out your readings a bit longer.

 

Those values represent an Apparent Attenuation of 44% which is too low of a value for me to think your beer is 'done'. Can you provide more details about your grain bill (fermentables) for this batch. Do you have tons of ingredients which are not fermentable?

Once your beer has completed primary fermentation (which I am guessing you have not) you really want to minimize exposure of the beer to air (oxygen); exposure of beer to oxygen just leads to oxidation which is generally not desired.

Cheers!

 

Are you using a hydrometer or a refractometer?

 

Did you utilize a refractometer calculator to obtain your final gravity value?

For example:

https://www.brewersfriend.com/refractometer-calculator/

Cheers!

 

@BadHuggyBear, to cut to the chase, if you didn't use a calculator, you need to. Raw refractometer readings are are slightly inaccurate for wort OGs and wildly inaccurate for beer FGs. They need to be adjusted by a calculator.

BTW, your beer is done. Well, it's probably done. But I'm betting it is.

 

Just to be clear, you can't necessarily tell it's (successfully) done by lack of visible CO2 off-gassing. It could still be off-gassing, but the CO2 is escaping through a leak. Or there's no more CO2 being made, but it's because the yeast have quit early and didn't attenuate as far as they should have.

However, 9 times out of 10, when a new brewer asks about an unexpectedly high FG and they are using refractometer, we find out it's actually finished (successfully) once the refractometer readings are adjusted.

 

I also have a conical, and I typically dump yeast. You can't fight your way into a space where something is being pushed out. If I am at all concerned about it. I close up the fermenter so the c02 build up essentially farts that yeast cake out. Never had a problem. At two weeks. If the sg is where it damn well better be. I might actually consider just closing up and start collecting that c02 still being produced so I can get ready to package it.

 

You’re 11 days post-pitch and possibly unsure of present gravity. If primary fermentation is done or even nearly so, adding O2 will probably undesirable results, unless a goal is accelerated staling.
If primary fermentation is far from done (doubtful) it’s likely due to unhealthy, or mistreatment of, yeast at some point.

Consider passing along this link to your fiend. The last three paragraphs might be helpful for those (like me) who are not particularly attuned to biochemistry jargon.
https://www.morebeer.com/articles/oxygen_in_fermentation

 

Correction to my last post:
The three paragraphs of interest I referred to are not the last three, but are more in the middle of the article and begin with "The hazards of respiration"

 

I have a question. If someone filled the yeast drain cavity with CO2 and closed it, then dumped the yeast cake for what ever reason there would be little to no O2 introduced right? Also could you just wait to you transfer the beer to bottling to dump the yeast? Just curious, I don’t have a conical fermentor. I’m still using buckets. I also just brewed a stout and am keeping my freezer/fermentor at 68 degrees. It smells like bananas every time I open the freezer lid. I’m guessing that’s the fruity esters I'm smelling

 

What do you mean by the yeast drain cavity?

You could, but then there would be no reason to dump, other than to clean the fermenter (and harvest the yeast, if applicable).

Interesting. Are you by any chance using an English strain? I've heard some of them will occasionally throw banana (Isoamyl Acetate, an Ester).