Wow, I don't think this batch could have gone worse...

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jajabee

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Well, just bottled the brewing buddy's Dunkelweisse, really shouldn't have... this batch has been a disaster. It was his first AG, my third, and first AG wheat beer for both. We must have used the wrong mill at the LHBS or something, or maybe the too-high temps at the beginning of the mash killed it, cause the efficiency was like 38%... 1.030 instead of 1.057 or so. Okay, whatever, it'll be weak. So into the carboy it goes, forms a bit of a krausen the next day, then settles down real quick. Hmm, I think, I wonder if that's okay. But I figured, eh, don't worry, relax! :p

So today we take a reading as we siphon into the bottling bucket, 2 weeks after brewing, and damn, the gravity is 1.025!! From 1.030 to 1.025 in 2 weeks? Uh oh. FG should be like 1.007. Sooo... I'm like, crap! What do we do? We decided to go ahead and bottle it, since all the equipment was set up and we'd already siphoned it... so now I'm sitting here wondering when the bottles are going to start exploding. Sigh. Plus he tossed a new pack of yeast along with the priming sugar into the bottling bucket, so that'll probably just make it worse, right?

I'm seriously thinking about uncapping them all tomorrow and putting some sanitized balloons over the mouth of each bottle. That'd at least prevent a trip to the hospital, right? :p
 
Sir,

I'm a complete n00b, so take everything I say with a giant grain of salt.

I remember reading that enzymes deactivate at a certain temperature. I don't know what exactly that temperature is, nor how high ya'll initially cooked your grains, but that would explain the lower gravity.

If the reading is accurate (any chance the hydrometer is messed up / poorly calibrated or the reading wasn't adjusted for temperature) then there's just nothing left in the brew to ferment.

To reinforce that, if you take a sip of the FG sample, it should taste slightly sweet if fermentation stalled out. (or sour if certain goobers decided to eat the sugar instead)

Also, throwing another packet of yeast in shouldn't make any difference in the carbonation. You only get as much CO2 as how much sugar you threw into it. Twice as much yeast, same sugar, maybe it'll carbonate twice as fast? Either way it'll run out of the same amount of food and call it quits at the bottom of the bottle, right?

So.... Unless there was some kind of terrible disturbance in the yeast while fermenting or the FG was sweet tasting, then you're gonna have some beer you can pound like hell. (Couldn't hurt to put it under a kevlar blanket just in case tho)
 
Hi Jaja -

Sounds frustrating. Doesn't help now, but one option for future batches is to deal with low original gravity by adding some dry extract to the boil. Key to this is to have the extract lying around, and to remember to adjust the hydrometer reading for temperature (BeerSmith will do that for you).

For your current batch, if you mashed at too high a temp, you may have a lot of unfermentable sugars in your beer, hence your high final gravity. Don't know, but it seems like a possibilty.
 
Sounds like bottle bombs to me... You all should not have bottled it with it being so high...

I would have pitched some more yeast and left it in the fermentor to see what happens maybe throw in a couple beeno tabs to see if that helped get it down to where you want....
 
Sounds like bottle bombs to me... You all should not have bottled it with it being so high...

I would have pitched some more yeast and left it in the fermentor to see what happens maybe throw in a couple beeno tabs to see if that helped get it down to where you want....

No, after two weeks I'd say that's just as far as that wort wants to let the yeast take it. What yeast did you use? How much? What was your fermentation temp? Beano might not have been a bad idea to try to save this beer. It will ferment out EVERYTHING leaving you with a very low FG and a bodyless beer but that would probably be better than what you're going to end up with.

As was mentioned, high mash temps result in a very unfermentable wort (which gave you really bad attenuation) as well as denatured enzymes which resulted in poor conversion (and that's where your low OG came from). You pretty much made some kind of malt soda. I doubt you'll want to drink it, but I don't think there is going to be any harm in trying.

When you're just beginning at AG, it is a good idea to keep some malt extract on hand. That way if your efficiency is awful, you can just say it was a PM!
 
Sir,

I'm a complete n00b, so take everything I say with a giant grain of salt.

I remember reading that enzymes deactivate at a certain temperature. I don't know what exactly that temperature is, nor how high ya'll initially cooked your grains, but that would explain the lower gravity.

If the reading is accurate (any chance the hydrometer is messed up / poorly calibrated or the reading wasn't adjusted for temperature) then there's just nothing left in the brew to ferment.

To reinforce that, if you take a sip of the FG sample, it should taste slightly sweet if fermentation stalled out. (or sour if certain goobers decided to eat the sugar instead)

Also, throwing another packet of yeast in shouldn't make any difference in the carbonation. You only get as much CO2 as how much sugar you threw into it. Twice as much yeast, same sugar, maybe it'll carbonate twice as fast? Either way it'll run out of the same amount of food and call it quits at the bottom of the bottle, right?

So.... Unless there was some kind of terrible disturbance in the yeast while fermenting or the FG was sweet tasting, then you're gonna have some beer you can pound like hell. (Couldn't hurt to put it under a kevlar blanket just in case tho)

Throwing another pack of yeast will cause it to attenuate more if the original yeast that was pitched is dead, which may be the case since it only supposedly attenuated .005 points. If there are really that mnay fermentables left and he pitched healthy new yeast and priming sugar in there, then I'd say bottle bombs are a good likelihood.

If, on the other hand, he mashed at way too high a temp, and turned most of the fermentable matter into unfermentable, long chain sugar molecules, then he may have mashed a nearly unfermentable wort.....I don't know if this is truly possible to this extreme a degree, but if so it would explain the low efficiency and lack of attenuation.
 
Thanks all. The mash was an hour long, and for the first 15 minutes or so I think the temps were in the mid to high 160's. He added ice about 15 minutes in and brought it down to the low 150's, which dropped to about 149-148 by the end of the mash.

Obviously I'd rather have the malt soda than the bottle bombs, but yeah, wow. We won't be making these mistakes again.
 
Call me lazy, but this is one of the (smaller) reasons I got into kegging my beers. I think it would be next to impossible to have a keg explode on you, and its MUCH easier than bottling. The only downside is its not as easily shared with others. (Which means more for MEEEEEEEEE)
-Me
 
Sure it could. You could have harvested the yeast from some precious bottles of your favorite beer, formulated a recipe, had your electric heating element go bad during mash, screwed up the sparge and final volumes, dump $20 worth of hops into it. Then 3 weeks later, your trusted beer tasting wench tells you it "kinda tastes like man juice".

I'll be pitching that one.
 

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