Hefeweizen Rack to Secondary

In the first couple days in the bucket, the beer foamed up enough that we had to clean and refill the airlock and wipe some beer off the top of the bucket. No big deal though, and the beer was fine for the remainder of primary fermentation.

After five days in the bucket, the bubbling in the airlock had slowed to two bubbles per minute. We moved the bucket upstairs, sanitized the siphon, piping, and carboy, and opened up the bucket. There was still some foam sitting on top of the beer, but it wasn't too bad. It was also smelling more like actual beer. :-)

We siphoned the beer into the glass carboy, filling almost all the way to the brim and dumping the rest into a measuring cup so we could see how much we had to spare at this step. The answer was "not much." We had less than a cup left over, and that was after tilting the bucket to keep the siphon going. It's not that there wasn't enough liquid in the bucket, but that the siphon can only pull liquid up until it gets so shallow that it's pulling in air. Seems like we basically need to shoot for a batch size that's a full quart more than the carboy size.

Also, during the filling the beer foams up a little, and in order to make sure you get the carboy full you have to just let the foam spill right over the carboy. Picture filling a somewhat heady beer so that beer is up to the brim, despite letting the head spill all over the sides of the glass. Next time we need to put the carboy in some kind of pan or something to catch the overflow and reduce the mess. :-)

We did have enough left over after racking to get a gravity reading, which was 1.018. Given the original gravity, the beer should now be at 5.3%. We also had enough left to taste it. It really tastes like a good hefeweizen! Flat and room temperature of course, but it does have some nice banana flavors from the yeast that we were going for. Now it's starting to feel like an excruciating wait for bottling and carbonation before we can actually try the final product. Excited that things seem to be going in the right direction though!

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