How Do I Achieve a Lower Final Gravity with California Common Yeast?

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csboehm

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I'm putting together my first California Common recipe. This will be an all-grain batch. I'm a little stumped how to achieve the final gravity the style calls for as the yeasts used for this style have a much lower attenuation. My grain bill is as follows:

9 lbs American - Pale 2-Row
1 lb American Caramel / Crystal 80L
0.5 lbs American- Victory

I was planning at mashing around 150F @ 1.5 qts per pound for 60 minutes. At 75% efficiency (which I've hit consistently with other batches), the O.G. will be 1.052. I'm going to use White Labs San Francisco Lager (WLP810) yeast, but the average attenuation is only 67.5%. This leaves me with a F.G. of 1.017 while the max to stay within spec for this style is 1.014. What am I missing? A large yeast starter? Lower mash temp? Looser mash? Any help would be great appreciated. Thanks!
 
Aerate aerate aerate. Yeast nutrients helps too. Get to shaking or buy a cheap drill and mix in

Helps yeast rage on sugar.
 
Once the kräusen starts to fall off pretty good raise the temp to 68-70 for the remainder of the fermentation. The higher temp will help the yeast finish off as much sugar as possible and help with diacetyl if there is any (not real familiar with the yeast).
 
You could drop the mash temp to 149. Also, minimizing the specialty grains will help lower the FG. A pound of crystal leaves a fair amount of unfermentables. Also, once the initial fermentation activity has slowed down, I like to rouse the yeast some by just rocking the fermentor and raising the temp.

This yeast will attenuate more than 67.5%. I just fermented a pils at about 56 degrees with this yeast.
 
Oxygen and pitching rates are key, but I've never gotten attenuation that poor with Cali Common yeast. You really need to find out for yourself how it performs in your brewery- published numbers are never all that useful to me.
 
I'm putting together my first California Common recipe. This will be an all-grain batch. I'm a little stumped how to achieve the final gravity the style calls for as the yeasts used for this style have a much lower attenuation. My grain bill is as follows:

9 lbs American - Pale 2-Row
1 lb American Caramel / Crystal 80L
0.5 lbs American- Victory

I was planning at mashing around 150F @ 1.5 qts per pound for 60 minutes. At 75% efficiency (which I've hit consistently with other batches), the O.G. will be 1.052. I'm going to use White Labs San Francisco Lager (WLP810) yeast, but the average attenuation is only 67.5%. This leaves me with a F.G. of 1.017 while the max to stay within spec for this style is 1.014. What am I missing? A large yeast starter? Lower mash temp? Looser mash? Any help would be great appreciated. Thanks!

How do you know you'll only get 67.5% attenuation? Those ratings are a way of comparing one yeast to another and don't necessarily reflect the attenuation you'll actually get. You can change the mash temp or mash for a longer time and get higher attenuation.
 
Thanks all for the help. This is only the third recipe I've designed on my own, so I'm still getting a feel for this. I think I will drop the mash to 149F, possibly drop a bit of the Crystal malt, oxygenate the crap out of the wort, and bump up the temperature towards the end of fermentation.

How do you know you'll only get 67.5% attenuation? Those ratings are a way of comparing one yeast to another and don't necessarily reflect the attenuation you'll actually get. You can change the mash temp or mash for a longer time and get higher attenuation.

I really don't know for certain this is what I will get. I was taking the average which is what was calculated by the recipe builder I was using. According to White Labs, 70% is the max attenuation I will get which still leaves me a little high. If I understand what you are saying, this is more of a baseline rather than a true maximum attenuation. Is that correct?
 
Oxygen and pitching rates are key, but I've never gotten attenuation that poor with Cali Common yeast. You really need to find out for yourself how it performs in your brewery- published numbers are never all that useful to me.

I just read through your Kickstarter proposal and watched your video. It sounds like a great idea and you guys are both passionate about it. Congrats on having the guts to go out on your own. Good luck!
 
The last California Common I did, mash temp was 150, OG was 1.063 and it got down to 1.015 in 3 weeks @62, which I then kegged and drank. It was rather good.
Starting from 1.050-something you should be fine. Oxygenate well, pitch proper yeast amount.
 
Crystal donsn't increase the final gravity as much as you may think. The biggest key is mash temperature. a 90 minute 145 should do the trick. Also, the addition of simple sugars might be warranted.

Fermentability of crystal:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/12/fermentability-of-crystal-malt.html

And how to calculate Final Gravity based on recipe including mash temp:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/12/final-gravity-in-recipe-formulation.html

Mash temperature theory and it's effect on final gravity coming on January 5th, and real data and practical application coming on January 7th.
 
I brewed this up today. Things didn't go exactly as planned, but everything was fine in the end. I opted to mash for 90 minutes at 145F to get a more fermentable mash. I didn't account for an increase in efficiency, so I ended up with about a 78% conversion rate rather than the expected 75%. I figured I would just let it ride rather than trying to compensate. With a frigid wind blowing across the top of my boiling pot for most of the day, my boil off rater was much slower than normal, so over the course of a 90 minute boil I had an extra 0.5 gallons of wort. I planned for 5.5 gallons of wort with an O.G. of 1.052 and 40 IBUs, and ended up with 6.0 gallons of wort with an O.G. of 1.050 and 36 IBUs. Not what I planned, but still within spec. Now just to wait and see where the F.G. lands! Thanks all for your help. I'll post in about two weeks when I transfer to the secondary and take a sample.
 
I'm interested to see how you do. I brewed a similar recipe (Jamil's) at 150 for 70 mins and followed his advice to pitch wyeast 2112 CA lager at 58 degrees and then (I'm using fermentation chamber) slowly ramp I up to 65 over the course of about 10 days. I also had 78% efficiency but had planned for 70% so my OG was too high at 1.061. 10 days into primary ferment and at 65 degrees I was at 1.025 (uggh). I increased to 66, gently roused the yeast. Today at 15 days it was about 1.020 (another uggh). Roused again and I'm raising to the top end of the recommended wyeast temp of 68 and will give it another week. I'm guessing I can't get to 1.014 for style but still too sweet at 1.020.
 
I'm interested to see how you do. I brewed a similar recipe (Jamil's) at 150 for 70 mins and followed his advice to pitch wyeast 2112 CA lager at 58 degrees and then (I'm using fermentation chamber) slowly ramp I up to 65 over the course of about 10 days. I also had 78% efficiency but had planned for 70% so my OG was too high at 1.061. 10 days into primary ferment and at 65 degrees I was at 1.025 (uggh). I increased to 66, gently roused the yeast. Today at 15 days it was about 1.020 (another uggh). Roused again and I'm raising to the top end of the recommended wyeast temp of 68 and will give it another week. I'm guessing I can't get to 1.014 for style but still too sweet at 1.020.

Plotting your SG it looks like a normal logrithmic fermentation, albitit a slow one. Based on your measurements I bet it will finish on 1/13 at a final gravity of 1.016.

http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-calculate-fermentation-time.html
 
I'm interested to see how you do. I brewed a similar recipe (Jamil's) at 150 for 70 mins and followed his advice to pitch wyeast 2112 CA lager at 58 degrees and then (I'm using fermentation chamber) slowly ramp I up to 65 over the course of about 10 days. I also had 78% efficiency but had planned for 70% so my OG was too high at 1.061. 10 days into primary ferment and at 65 degrees I was at 1.025 (uggh). I increased to 66, gently roused the yeast. Today at 15 days it was about 1.020 (another uggh). Roused again and I'm raising to the top end of the recommended wyeast temp of 68 and will give it another week. I'm guessing I can't get to 1.014 for style but still too sweet at 1.020.

I recently moved, and I wasn't able to take my old fermentation fridge with me, so, unfortunately, I'm at the mercy of the ambient temperature in my basement which is currently 62F. It's still fermenting at more than a bubble a second after 5 days. I plan on taking a reading once thing slow down a little more. I also found out that I may have had a thermometer calibration issue when setting up my mash. I used two different thermometers, and I need to figure out which is correct. I was either at 145F for 90 minutes or 152F for 90 minutes... I guess only time will tell with what happens during fermentation. I know it's not stylistically accurate, but you may want to consider tossing in another yeast to ferment it down those last few points if you're still higher than you would like.
 
Good news on the mash temp. I used one thermometer to measure the strike water and another that I stuck in the mash tun after the water was added and let it in there for the duration of the mash. When I pulled it out, it read 152F, not the 145F I was shooting for. Not great, but it wouldn't have been the end of the world either. I just calibrated both thermometers with ice water and used an infrared thermometer as a third measurement. The thermometer used for the strike water and the infrared thermometer both read 28F. The thermometer used in the mash read 35F. Exactly 7F apart which means my mash was spot on at 145F.
 
I took a reading this evening, as the bubbling is beginning to slow. I'm down to 1.019 after 5 days. There's a bubble about once every 3 or 4 seconds now.
 
Good news on the mash temp. I used one thermometer to measure the strike water and another that I stuck in the mash tun after the water was added and let it in there for the duration of the mash. When I pulled it out, it read 152F, not the 145F I was shooting for. Not great, but it wouldn't have been the end of the world either. I just calibrated both thermometers with ice water and used an infrared thermometer as a third measurement. The thermometer used for the strike water and the infrared thermometer both read 28F. The thermometer used in the mash read 35F. Exactly 7F apart which means my mash was spot on at 145F.
Temperature deviation at freezing isn't always a good indicator of temperature deviation at mash temps. I measures the compensation factors for a new thermometer recently and it measured 1 degree high at freezing and 2 degrees high at boiling. You might want to measure them at boiling to make sure it all follows what you expect. If you want to get even closer you can interpolate the correction factors.
 
Temperature deviation at freezing isn't always a good indicator of temperature deviation at mash temps. I measures the compensation factors for a new thermometer recently and it measured 1 degree high at freezing and 2 degrees high at boiling. You might want to measure them at boiling to make sure it all follows what you expect. If you want to get even closer you can interpolate the correction factors.

I checked them both at room temperature after leaving both on the counter side by side last night, and I was starting to see what you mention here. The there is still a variance, but the gap has closed a bit. I'll check them both at boiling temps this evening. Thanks!
 
The F.G. of this batch is 1.015. Not quite as low as I was shooting for, but the flavor and body is nice in the sample I took. I'm still trying to work out possible thermometer calibration issues I ran into, so the mash temperature may have been a bit higher than intended. Not perfectly within spec for the style, but darn close. Regardless, it will certainly be plenty drinkable, and it was a good learning experience. Thanks all for your help.
 
I also missed the ideal gravity range and hit 1.017 (was stuck at 1.020 so better then nothing). I was doomed after having unexpectedly high efficiency in the mash giving me a 1.061 OG instead of target of 1.054. Bottom line is you can only squeeze so much attenuation from the low attenuating California Lager yeast.
 
72% attenuation sounds like a solid effort from this yeast. Like you said, the high OG messed you up from the start. Regardless, I'm sure it will still be plenty drinkable.

I'm still hopeful that I will hit it next time once I sort out my thermometer issues. I had higher then expected efficiency as well, but a slower boil off in the cold weather offset that nicely.
 
Resurrecting an old thread, but I blindly used california common yeast with a high OG of about 1.078. Needless to say, its down to 1.028 and seems to be sticking there for about 2 weeks now. Its high but fits in the attenuation expectations. Not sure if I should try throwing in some champagne yeast to get it down more.
 
The wort has a lot more to do with attenuation than the yeast you use. I can use the same yeast and get anywhere from 60-90% attenuation depending on wort composition.
 
Just checked notes from my last Cali Common... and went from 1.060 (I know, I know... a little high :cross:) to 1.013. Mashed at 150 and fermented a touch under 60.
 
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