no secondary

[Bugeater]

I generally stopped doing secondaries a couple years ago. I do them now and then when I do a true secondary (add more fermentables late in fermentation instead of just a bright tank. I will also do the bright tank routine before kegging if I need to get a beer exceptionally clear for a competition or if I plan on transporting a keg to a party or other event where I don't want any sediment thrown back into suspension.

I, too, am generally lazy. I like being able to just toss the fermenter in the fermentation fridge and just forget about it for 3 or 4 weeks until I get around to kegging it. I have not had a problem with underattenuation since I quit trying to transfer the beer during fermentation. Now the beer sits on enough yeast during the entire process to get the job done right. Fears of autolysis are way overblown. If you have a healthy yeast pitch I believe you will need to have the beer on the whole yeast cake for a couple months before you need to worry about autolysis.

Wayne

[np0x]

Something that has been bugging me since listenting to some of the older brew strongs about not using a secondary AND dry hopping is what I perceive as a collision of two concepts: Dry Hopping and No Secondary.

1. No Secondary == well, no secondary
2. Dry hopping is suggested to be done for 3-5 days and when the fermentation is coming to a close(say 80% complete).

If this is the case, then I would be dry hopping at 1-2 weeks, but then i can't get the beer off the hops AND keep it on the yeast cake.

So my intuition suggests the correct direction would be to ignore the 80% reference(can't remember who said it, JP?) and primary for the full four weeks and then dry hop 4 days from racking off the yeast cake.

Thoughts? Better interpretation?

Don't worry, I am having a homebrew, in fact i recently dry hopped some beer and did my own version of meeting these two conflicting intentions in the middle, 2.5 weeks on yeast, 5 days on hops, racked after 3 weeks from pitch date.

Thoughts? Thoughts from the source?

[Bugeater]

I solve the dry hop/no secondary quandry by simply dry hopping in the keg using a hop bag.

Wayne