jonnymorris said:
mick may said:
Personally, I don't think it'll make any difference to the clarifty of your brew. It would be worth getting it out of your dirty FV though.
In my head I see a few advantages.
Firstly getting it off of the mixing solids makes the remaining solids more likely to drop out. Even though the gravity will change only a little by taking it off the trub, there will still be a difference making it more likely for remaining solids to fall.
Secondly, putting it into secondary means that rather than eating all the dead yeast in the trub the live yeast are forced to get tucked into the remaining solids thus clearing the beer further. While it's in the primary a fair whack of the yeast will happily cannibalise what's at the bottom of the bucket, and ignore the dribs and drabs in the brew itself.
Thirdly as I understand it munching on the dead yeast constantly leads to mutations? That being the case when it comes to priming/bottle conditioning you will also have more mutated strains working on the sugars thus creating different flavours than with normal healthy yeast.
Lastly if you have had a fairly big fermentation then the foamy head on the top sides of the bucket will be more susceptible to infection and thus risk your beer at the later stages.
The only disadvantages I see is that additional equipment will be required (additional FV), it will take some time to do the process and if you don't clean things properly you are risking infection. IMO the risk of infection is minimal, something would need to be really wrong to cause an infection when transferring as the yeast colonies should be massive and able to handle themselves amicably by that stage. I have often wondered if people having issues when transferring have already had the issues in the primary, and just not noticed, as IMO the primary is the most likely place to pick up an infection.
This is all my own thinking though, logically it makes sense to me... I understand it won't to everyone :)
