Lagering in primary?

[Budgie]

My Pilsner is currently in the fridge, it's been going almost 3 weeks. It had 8 days at 11.5°C then up to 18 for 48hours. I've been slowly bringing the temp down since then. I know that the usual thing to do would be to transfer to secondary for lagering.

If I transfer to another FVS it's gonna have 5 litres of headspace so do I need to worry about oxidisation? My other thought was just to leave it in primary but maybe that's be too much time in the yeast.

What do you reckon?

 

[Fil]

the beer will contain co2 so as long as you rack off into a 2ndary vessel using a tube long enough to reach the bottom of the receiving vessel, the agitation of transfer And contact with the room temperature vessel should 'shake' out enough co2 to safely blanket the transferred brew imho

 

[Brewmarc]

Top answer from Fil above:thumb:
In addition i would add..... lagering is usually done for a reasonable time period comercially up to a year but for us home brewers 1 month or more is usual so its far better to transfer the beer off the yeast to prevent off flavours from dead yeast. (Autolase).
A bit of further info".....True lager yeast produces sulphur compounds during yeast metabolism the rotten eggy smell. Its the Co2 as it purges during lagering at cold temps that effectively scrubs off these off flavours that produce lagers with that clean crisp pallet.

 

[Budgie]

Thanks guys. I'm planning to lager for about 6 weeks so I'll definitely rack it off in the next couple of days. :thumb: