did I rack to secondary fermentation too early?

my first home brew, be gentle. golden malt, Rye malt ale started at 1.052, and I just racked it @ 1.022 and dry hopped it per the recipe. did I rack to secondary fermentation too early?

Topic rye secondary-fermentation ale homebrew

Category Mac


Probably not.

Typically people rack to secondary once most signs of active fermentation are done in the primary fermenter. 1.022 seems too high for primary to be completely done, but it's impossible to say without knowing what the gravity was the day before and after that, how many days it's been fermenting, what the activity level is in the fermenter, etc. But you might just have wort high in unfermentable sugars. Knowing the gravity at one single point in process only really helps if you're very familiar with the fermentability of your wort (as in, you know how low it's going to get). But there's no real harm to racking early, except maybe that it defeats the benefits for clarification you'd typically see if you waited for primary to finish first.

Dry-hopping at this point shouldn't give you any problems. Strictly speaking you want to wait until after vigorous fermentation so that the huge amount of CO2 generated isn't stripping hop aroma compounds out of the beer. But even if fermentation is still trailing off, you'll be absolutely fine here. You'll still get plenty of hop aroma.

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