Blackberry Surprise - Moving to the Secondary

"Moving to the secondary"
Posting 8/4/2012, describing events of 7/29/012.

This is the second official installment of the Blackberry Surprise stream.  There was an explosion issue to document unofficially, but nominally that shouldn't happen, so this should be the next step.

Secondary Fermentation:
First, let's put on some music.  I'd recommend looping Karl Wolf's "Africa" at this point....  Or maybe Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me."  There is no good reason for those songs, I just like them tonight.

Second, let's assemble the hardware:

Sanitize
As is almost always the case when brewing, our first real step is sanitizing everything.

The 6 G carboy is most easily sanitized outside, so I place it in the window / pass-through between my apartment and the great outdoors.

Man, I love that view.  When I saw this apartment and saw that I would have this handy-dandy pass-through from my kitchen to an awesome roofdeck with that view, I signed the lease the next day.  Oh, the towel is there because that's my unfinished wood island and I don't want it to get wet and warp.  You can see I scooped some sanitizer through a funnel into the carboy inside.  I used to just try to pour as much as I could into the narrow mouth of that bottle outside, but I finally bought a funnel so I thought I'd use it.

With the carboy outside where there is a water hose, it is really easy to fill.  I pick it up and shake it some at the start to try to dissolve as much as possible, because it is impossible to pick up and shake when it's full (6 G water weighs 50 lbs, and the glass carboy is probably 10-20 or more lbs by itself, so it's "moveable" but not "shakeable" for me).

This gets filled all the way to the top and then a little bit so that the rim of the carboy also gets sanitized.

Next we sanitize everything else.  Sometimes I fill one side of my kitchen sink with sanitizing solution, but today I want to do a load of dishes while I wait on sanitization, so we'll sanitize everything in my large brew pot.  Pretty easy - fill the pot with sanitizing solution and toss everything in!

Because I have no water vessels large enough to fully submerse the auto-siphon, its peices will be rotated every 5 min or so for about half an hour to make sure they are sanitized along the full length.

Great!  Now we walk away and do something else for about half an hour!  (Except don't go too far, we have to make sure to rotate the auto-siphon every 5 min or so.  This is a good time to do the dishes!)

Rinse
Sanitizing solution =/= good drinks. 

Man, that carboy holds a lot of water.  It took so long to drain that I had time to go back inside and grab my camera and it's still flowing.  The plants downstairs will be happy!  (One of those plants is an apricot tree.  When it's happy, I'm happy.... mmmm)

Everything is rinsed and we are ready to move on!

Transfer Beer from Primary Fermenter to Secondary Fermenter
Hey, look at that.  After a week of fermenting, that "wort" we finished with last time has turned into a "beer!"  Isn't brewing fun!

First, I (VERY CAREFULLY) move the beer from the floor to the table.  We do not want to stir up the yeast poop that has settled out onto the bottom to get suspended in our good beer!  Yeast poop is not good drinks.  I let it sit for a little bit (actually, I let it sit the whole time I was sanitizing) so any solids I may have slushed around can settle, and then I take the airlock out.

Then I take the lid off.  Very carefully, again, because I don't want to disturb the layer of yeast poop at the bottom.  This sounds easy, but you pretty much need rock-climber fingers and a little bit of experience to do it correctly.  I would say you could practice on an empty fermenter for a little bit, but perhaps tis better to scale up your brewing operation to more batches per unit time if you think you need practice!

That's kind of gross, really.  But here is what the beer should look like:

Yeah, I know it looks gross right now.  The floaters are yeast-poop-covered blueberries.  Not good drinks!  Our baby beer needs to age a few more weeks before it is ready to bottle, so we want to rescue it from all that nasty yeast poop everywhere so it can develop.  We'll do that with this:

Whoops, sorry, got distracted.  Isn't that just lovely?  I love the view from my kitchen window.

This is the right photo.  This is an auto-start siphon.  When I started brewing, I did not have one of these and had to mouth-start my siphons.  To try to maintain a somewhat sanitary situation, one of us would have to mouthwash with vodka ahead of time.  Then one of us would have to try to suck beer through basically through a 3-foot long, 1 cm inner diameter flexible straw.  It would take multiple tries, and someone always wound up with at least a mouth full of not quite-there-yet room temperature beer.  Auto-start siphons?  Possibly the best investment a home-brewer could make.

Here's how it works:

There is a one-way valve at the end of the auto-siphon.  This only lets fluid come into the tube, not out (well, it leaks some but not too badly).  There is an inner tube that has a plunger with an air-tight (supposedly, mine is starting to leak a little) seal to the inner wall of the outer tubing.  When you pull the inner tube out, away from the 1-way valve, beer flows into the auto-siphon.  When you push the inner tube back down towards the 1-way valve, the beer has no where to go but up through the hollow inner tube and out down into your secondary fermenter.  This will make more sense in the following photographs.

Here's the basic set-up.  We've got the secondary at a lower level than the primary, and the tube connected to the auto-siphon is threaded down into the secondary.  The next step takes two hands, so no photograph until my brewing buddy moves down to So Cal, but basically it's just pump the inner tube up and down a few times while the end of the auto-siphon is somewhere in the middle of the beer.  We want to avoid transferring any floating yeast poop on the blueberries or any settled-out yeast poop at the bottom of the barrel.

Success!  The beer is running smoothly from the primary....

Down into the secondary.  Now there's nothing to do but stand here for about 20 minutes and try to hold the auto-siphon as still as possible in between the upper and lower levels of yeast poop.

....and take pictures.

It's coming along!

Starting to get a little tricky to keep the siphon between the two layers...  also, that seal is leaking a lot now.  Can you see the difference in color from all the bubbles?  My camera isn't fast enough to pick up the individual bubbles that are moving very fast.  Therefore....

Time to move the secondary down a level to help keep the flow of water rate higher than the introduction of air.  As a note, it is bad to introduce air into your brew at this stage.  Air has oxygen in it, and oxygen reacts with compounds in beer to create aldehydes, ketones, and acids, which are all bad off-notes and some will give you a really bad stinking hang-over.  Let's keep the oxygen out and try not to invite hang-overs to the party.

Tricky tricky!  I'm tilting the pail a little to increase the distance between the brown sludge at the bottom and the blueberry sludge at the top.  It's something where yoga and "hold that pose" kind of training really helps out.  I have to sit in this weird position moving only slightly for like 5 minutes in order to pull this off.

But it's worth it!  Success!  Look at that beautiful red-brown color!

Excellent.  We are all done for this step except for the clean-up!

It is very important to rinse and rinse and keep rinsing the siphon and the tubing, long past when you think they are clean.  If they aren't completely clean, you will come back to your brewing closet to mold inside these.  No one likes mold, and an auto-siphon costs $12.95 so you don't want to screw one up so bad you have to buy another one.

Cheers, and happy brewing!