Fermentation finished early

[Dugger]

Hi Dugger.

it has been awhile since i've seen you here but then again, i"m not on here much of late either. Since I have never done the 14 day method, you are saying the whole bag will eventually sink?. How does that do for racking. I find the eclipse and now showcase (since i've done a few of those) a real pain to rack out of the primary. It seems a bit easier now that I'm racking at about 3 weeks. Things are a bit more compacted at that stage.

cheers

During active fermentation I will flip the skins bag over, punch it down and stir it around and this releases quite a bit of the CO2, so when fermentation essentially finishes, most of the gas is gone and the bag will sink. As far as racking goes, I’m not sure what you mean. At that stage I remove the skins, squeeze the bag into the bucket and discard it. I agree that these kits have a lot of sediment - I used to make mostly Spagnols kits and they were much easier to deal with. Like you say the Eclipse and Showcase have a lot and not compacted so what I do is rack from the bucket to an Italian ribbed carboy, which is about 24 l, and take over as much as I can, then after a couple of days, I rack to my Italian smooth carboy which is a true 23 l, and go from there. I find it hard to get 30 bottles out of these kits!

 

[jgmann67]

Hi Dugger.

it has been awhile since i've seen you here but then again, i"m not on here much of late either. Since I have never done the 14 day method, you are saying the whole bag will eventually sink?. How does that do for racking. I find the eclipse and now showcase (since i've done a few of those) a real pain to rack out of the primary. It seems a bit easier now that I'm racking at about 3 weeks. Things are a bit more compacted at that stage.

cheers

Putterrr - that's been my experience. Punch it for two weeks and the bag will sink (+/- 3 days). Then I just leave it alone... no need to stir. I've done 8 week EMs this way. Going to downshift to 5-6 week EM with my next red kit, just to see if there's any real difference. My guess is that the skins will have given up all the goodies by then.

 

[Putterrr]

Putterrr - that's been my experience. Punch it for two weeks and the bag will sink (+/- 3 days). Then I just leave it alone... no need to stir. I've done 8 week EMs this way. Going to downshift to 5-6 week EM with my next red kit, just to see if there's any real difference. My guess is that the skins will have given up all the goodies by then.

do you use your primary pail for EM or do you use another vessel like the wide mouth carboy?

thx

 

[jgmann67]

do you use your primary pail for EM or do you use another vessel like the wide mouth carboy?

thx

I use a 7 gallon Fermonster for my EMs - easy to seal, easy to monitor, easy to clean up after.