Conditioning Of Commercial Beers

[cpsmusic]

Hi,

I'm currently fermenting a JSAA clone. Once primary fermentation is finished I plan to leave it in the fermenter for another week or so in order to achieve at least some secondary fermentation.

This got me thinking - while it's no problem for me to do a secondary fermentation I was wondering what commercial breweries do, especially the larger ones. I imagine that they're under pressure to get the product out ASAP.

So my question is, does JSAA (or other similar beers) undergo a secondary fermentation, and what about beers from other breweries?

Cheers,

Chris

 

[felten]

Secondary fermentation isn't really the right term, you aren't exactly adding any new fermentables to ferment

Depending on the brewery, its size and equipment, they could be doing any number of things. I just finished listening to the meantime IPA podcast on the BN, as an example, they will ferment in their conical for a week and then transfer to a bright tank and let it sit at 0c for a week as a measure to chill proof it. That method seems pretty common, but macro breweries might have a different time line.

 

[HoppingMad]

While I can't talk for all of James Squire's Brewing operations, we had a James Squire brewer talk to our club a year ago about some of their processes.

His talk was on mash PH, but one thing he says the commercials and James Squire do is rack off the yeast cake as soon as they can before going to secondary. This caused some pretty animated discussion amongst our membership as many like the flavours a beer on yeast imparts and many like to leave in one vessel to mature the beer somewhat. He says the breweries simply cannot afford any adverse flavours from beer on yeast cake (such as autolysis which can impart woody, nutty, phenolic, and bandaid solvent) creeping into the beer. Many of us discounted this as people like Jamil leave their brews on yeast for ages sometimes without adverse effects, but I guess when you are in a commercial situation you can't afford to leave anything to chance as it could cost you money.

So in brief, yes they do a secondary at James Squire to my knowledge, but the beer is racked off yeast pronto. So I would guess you're looking at a short primary (around 5 days or as soon as the beer finishes which could be earlier) and a slightly longer secondary (7 days). He also said that James Squire used to use the english strain in the area of S-04 but switched to US-05 as it was more stable and less prone to stalling. The tooheys side use house strains.

_{Disclaimer- This info is all about a year and a bit old, and I drink homebrew so I might forget things or be slightly innaccurate, but to my knowledge until someone further in discounts this - it seemed true and correct.}

Hopper.

 

[cpsmusic]

Secondary fermentation isn't really the right term, you aren't exactly adding any new fermentables to ferment

Just going off what it says in How To Brew (p.90)

 

[DJR]

He also said that James Squire used to use the english strain in the area of S-04 but switched to US-05 as it was more stable and less prone to stalling.

Interesting