Purge sediment/yeast cake or no?

[JimEb]

My beer's been in a conical fermenter for a week now. Plan is to let it go 2 weeks before bottling. I forgot to take an original gravity reading so I was planning to start checking a few days prior to the 2 week mark.

Since I have a conical it is real easy to open up a ball valve and purge out sediment/yeast cake with minimal disruption to the beer inside (just have to make sure I pull the airlock so an air bubble doesn't burp back up through). I didn't strain the wort so I know there's probably lots of hops sitting down there.

Is there any benefit to doing that or should I just let be?

 

[flars]

The trub in the fermentor has no negative effect on the beer. An exception may be if you will leave the beer in the primary over two months or so.

Removing the yeast from the beer before it has reached final gravity and then extra time for the yeast to clean up natural off flavors will have a detrimental effect on the beer.

 

[j1n]

I don't think it matters if you dump it or not at this point. There is still yeast in suspension and the yeast that flocced out is at the bottom. If it were me id just leave it alone til your ready to bottle in another week.

 

[Yooper]

One of the advantages of a conical is the ability to dump trub. I'd do it now.

There are still hundreds of billions of yeast in suspension, and the flocculated yeast doesn't do the "clean up" work for the beer.

What's really nice is if you dump trub today and get rid of most of the hops debris and break material, you can dump again later (or at bottling) and have nice clean yeast slurry to use on the next batch(es).

 

[Bob]

If you're not going to harvest - though why you wouldn't, I can't imagine - purging the cone several times over several days will help ensure bright beer at bottling time. Purging is best done several times, as each time you do it more settled yeast/trub will slide down the cone toward the purge valve. There comes a diminishing return, however, when beer loss outweighs how much detritus you're removing.

Don't forget to sanitize the valve before purging, too.

Bob