13,594
edits
Changes
m
no edit summary
5) Bottle as soon as you hit a stable gravity. If you do it right, your final gravity should be 0.998-1.002 pretty quick. If you bottle soon, I find you don't get any [[Tetrahydropyridine|THP]] (presumably because there's enough healthy ''Saccharomyces'' around to ferment the priming sugar without producing it). It was only when I decided I wanted my beer to be a bit clearer, and so started leaving it in primary until it cleared, that I started regularly seeing small amounts of THP developing early in bottle conditioning.
For 4-5%-ish beers, the soonest I've started drinking was 1.5 weeks, but I've started in 2 weeks quite a few times(edit: 4 weeks sometimes). Typically, they hit the final gravity I want within a week, then I bottle them and they're properly carbonated in another week (sometimes less). They obviously develop and get "brettier" and more refined over time, but they're still good, and still funky that quickly.
</blockquote>