Black IPA Brew Follow Up

Good afternoon kids. It's a crappy 45° here in Oakville. Rainy and cold. But I found a great way to cheer me up. I racked my Black IPA into the secondary fermenter today. Racking is a brewing term for transferring. Not sure of the origin of the term, but I'm gonna stick with it. There is a big debate among homebrewers about the need to rack to a secondary. One side says yes, but yet others say no. Some say it increases the chance of messing up the beer, some say that the dead yeast can provide off flavors to the beer. I decided that I would rack it. So I racked 5 gallons of beer into one of my five gallon glass carboys. It looked and smelled and tasted fanstastic. I checked the Final Gravity (FG) and it was 1.021. It has a Starting Gravity (SG) of 1.075. If I did the math right, it's 7.2% ABV. Pretty damn good. It will now sit in the Fermentation Chamber for another 4 weeks before bottling.

Here's a few pics to show you the process:

Getting the process set up.

Hydrometer sitting in the graduated cylinder, full of beer.
And yes, I drank it when I was done. No sense wasting it.

Beer being racked into the secondary.

The beer, waiting on transfer to the secondary fermenter.
The crust is normal. It caused by the yeast and broken up hop pellets.

The trub, beer speak for leftovers. Mostly hops and dead yeast.

Close up view. Still smells hoppy good.

All cozy in the fermentator. See you in a month.

Close up of the labels.