Clarifying
After the primary fermentation is over, it’s time to put your beer into a carboy to clarify for a month.
Outline
- Place your Primary pail on the counter and the carboy directly underneath on the floor.
- Syphon the wort to the carboy.
- Put an airlock on the carboy.
Procedure
So to start this process, we are going to let gravity do our work for us. Instead of going out and buying an expensive electric pump, we will use the syphon hose. Even better if you have an auto syphon.
Put your primary pail on the kitchen counter and the carboy on the floor directly underneath. Place a phone book under the primary pail to lean it to one side so you can get more beer out of it when the level gets near the bottom of the pail. Don’t worry about the sediment, the racking cane or the auto syphon will keep it above the sediment enough where it will not get sucked in. To see more on how to use the auto syphon, check out another a product review I wrote called The Auto Siphon. And transfer the beer to the carboy. Try not to stir up the beer to much. Unlike when adding the wort to the primary pail when you wanted to add as much oxygen as you could, this stage you want as little as possible. Now you fill up your airlock with water or star san, put it in your rubber bung and cap your carboy.
Your beer should sit in your carboy for at least 4 weeks to allow the rest of the sediment to settle to the bottom. At that time your beer should be very transparent.
There are more advanced clarifying processes that we will get into in more advanced articles. We will work through these together at a later time.
The next step is bottling.