First Trub Collection

Brew # 5 (Morgan's Amber Ale) is 11 days old. It's the first time I've used the Fermentasaurus. Primary fermentation was a bit slow to start, but eventually the airlock bubbled away for 4-5 days, slowed, and stopped. As an experiment, I (slowly) raised the temperature by a couple of degrees Celcius towards the end, left it there for another couple of days, but now I want to get the beer off the trub.

One of the things I was keen on with the Fermentasaurus was the ability to remove the trub via the collection bottle without racking to a second FV. I cleaned and sanitised the collection bottle before connecting it at the time I started the primary fermentation. The plan had been to leave it closed for primary fermentation, then open the butterfly valve to collect the trub.

However, I realised that doing this would release the big bubble of air that is trapped in the bottle, which would float up through the whole wort. This is probably not such a big deal, and the air would continue to rise above the CO2, which is filling the space between the beer and the airlock (because CO2 is heavier than air, all the air would have been pushed out during primary fermentation), but I wasn't keen.

So, I removed the collecting bottle and filled with CO2 first, then reattached and opened the valve. I was expecting an instant reaction, but actually, the trub had created a bit of a seal over the bottle. It started to drain slowly into the bottle, but it was 30 seconds or more before the seal broke and the bottle filled.

The images above show the various stages of draining over the first 24 hours. In the third and fourth image you can see that small amounts of trub was floating up into the beer. It looked from the outside that bits were floating up out of the collection bottle back into the beer, but I assume some (more) of the trub was flowing into the bottle, unseen, and what I could see was just the displacement of loose trub as part of that flow.

As you can see, over time, everything settled and most of the trub ended in the collection bottle. I'm expecting this will complete in the next day or two. At that point, I'll empty, wash, and sanitise the bottle, then use it to add 50g of Mosaic hop pellets for the last few days in the FV before bottling...or maybe this will be the first keg beer.