Home Brewing UK vs USA & UK Brewery techniques

[nickrjsmith]

Hi,

I browse a lot of US home brew sites... they seems to have more members etc. However they all have a distinctive USA twist to their brewing... obviously.

two things come to mind.

a) They often say 3-4 weeks primary produces a much better beer. They talk about clarity and the time that yeast have to clean up the flavours of the beer.
Do you think this is so for an English real ale? Or does the beauty of our beer need to contain some of this in the cask?

b) Does anyone know generally how long our breweries generally do the primary fermentation for? Do they do a secondary? Or does the secondary happen in the cask?

I know about bright tanks and am not asking about them. Mainly I'm trying to find the perfect time to - primary / dry hop in primary / put in cask / condition - timetable.

At the moment I try to do this timetable

1) 2 weeks primary, last 5 days including dry hop, last 24-48 hrs gelatine finings.
2) 2 weeks cask with a little priming sugar.

Thanks for your thoughts.


Nick
b) With Engligh real ale / cask ale do you know how long breweries have it in the primary for?

 

[Hawks]

I'm not sure copying a brewery is going to be the best, the best thing about homebrewing is that you are not working to profit margins :hmm:

 

[nickrjsmith]

i'm not wanting to copy.. but emulate.

i'd just like to know the techniques they use.