FG quite high

I'm brewing a Williams Red Ale kit... first brew, extract kit.

I opened the fermenter for the first time today, its day 12 - happily everything looks great, no infection, etc.

... but...

My gravity is much higher that I was expecting. The kit says anything under 1.018 is good. The yeast (Wyeast smack pack) said I should expect 1.010.

Mine is at 1.025ish.

Thoughts?

Those bubbles mean fermentation probably isn't finished. Wait until you get 3 gravity readings the same each taken on consecutive days

Your going to get a lot of opinions on this one. Some will say swirl your fermenter to kick some yeast back into suspension, some will say repitch yeast, and even others will say wait it out, whats been done is done. By done I mean is my guess is you either underpitched yeast, or you didn't have temp control for fermentation. Lots of folks start like this and realize, Hey, with a little more equipment I could brew BETTER beer!
My suggestion is to search the site for stuck fermentation.
And set forth on your journey of buy more and more and more brewing stuff..
Every gadget, tool, and device helps control and tune your system a little better.
Good luck on your searches and maybe some here will chime in too!

And bubbles don't always mean fermentation, the beer will off gas co2 long after fermentation is complete, and still have some co2 dissolved in it!

This was an extract kit and there is a much talked about, general issue in that very frequently these kits will finish out around 1.020 (+/-) There is really no definitive explanation for it.

You can try and gently swirl the bucket and give it a couple days and take another reading to see if you can eek another couple points out of it or take it for what it is.

The krausen has dropped and the bubbles you see are just come CO2 escaping so most likely it's done.

Also, did you do a temp correction on your hydrometer reading and are you sure it's calibrated? To calibrate read a plain test of water/distilled water.

If this were my beer I would leave it for another week in the primary and give the yeast a chance to clean things up a bit and then bottle/keg.

I swirled and gave it 3 more days... no change.

It tastes alright, I guess. A little bit sweet, but would be drinkable if only it had some bubbles.

Is there any way I can rescue this, or should I just bottle it? Does the fermentation failure change the way I should prime the bottles?

I would pitch more yeast. I have had fermentations stick and I have pitched more yeast with good results.

I had the same thing happen with the batch that's carbonating now. OG was 1.044, FG 1.018. It read the same for five days so I just bottle. It'll be interesting to see how it comes out. It is a Midwest kit, Blackdog Ale.

The problem with adding more yeas is if the sugar is complex it won't make a bit of difference. Some people add the alfa enzyme (that we try to grow at mash temps.) I suppose this converts the remaining complex sugars so simple ones. I don't know if it can survive in the abv you have already acquired, though. A single beno tablet also contains an enzyme that will help convert complex sugars, but I hear this gives EXTREMELY dry beer. Might be better then 1.025 though.
Let us know what you choose and how it works!

****, I was hoping for a bit more certainty from the brewwizards here!

If I add more yeast and the sugar is indeed too complex for it, is there any downside apart from some wasted yeast?

amaurer said:

****, I was hoping for a bit more certainty from the brewwizards here!

If I add more yeast and the sugar is indeed too complex for it, is there any downside apart from some wasted yeast?

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No, not really. It won't hurt the beer at all...

OK. I've got some dry yeast from a Cooper's kit, I'll pitch that in tonight and see what happens....

EDIT: whoops, no I won't, its a lager yeast. Heh.

What were your fermentation temps? Did you pitch at high seventies then bring it down into the low 60s? If so, the yeast may have went dormant. You could consider raising the temperature, swirl, and see why happens.

Disclosure: I did that on my first extract kit. Recipe said pitch when wort cools below 80, which I did then took it down into my basement where over the next 2 days the temp slowly dropped into the low 60s. I brought the beer back upstairs for a few days (about 70) and swirled and got a few more points out of my beer. So it could happen!

The temps were a little unpredictable. I pitched around 66 deg and it was constant there for a few days, before heat spell sent it up to 72 deg. Then things cooled way down and it hovered near 65 or so.

On Thursday when it appeared to be stuck I swirled and brought it up to the 70's. Nothin.

I'm thinking I'll stop at the homebrew store on the way home and grab some dry yeast, see what that does.

I pitched a pack of Safale-05. Fingers crossed.

The yeast could very well help since the first pitch was so up and down temp wise.

Not looking good - after 24 hours 99% of the Safale is gone from the top. No sign of bubbles or krausen. 1.025 still.

Should I try sugaring it?

If I bottle now I'd get what, 2.5% ABV? My friends probably won't even drink that.

If you throw sugars you'll get more alcohol but it will lighten the body of your beer. You could try a honey or molasses or something like that, but it'll change your flavors. It could be nice with an amber though. You could also just put it aside, brew up a high gravity beer and blend the two.

Or, you could just not tell your buddies it's a 2.5% ABV beer. The placebo effect might kick in and you'll have a laugh watching them act drunk. Good luck.

BPal75 said:

Or, you could just not tell your buddies it's a 2.5% ABV beer. The placebo effect might kick in and you'll have a laugh watching them act drunk. Good luck.

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Heh! I would totally do this, but for the fact that one of my friends brewed a Mr. Beer kit a month ago and everyone remarked at how not drunk they were getting... so they'll be on guard!

I have two more kits on deck here, so I can afford to ruin a batch...

... so I boiled up 1.5lbs of sugar and threw it in. Gravity is up to ~1.040 again.

We'll see....

Heh! I would totally do this, but for the fact that one of my friends brewed a Mr. Beer kit a month ago and everyone remarked at how not drunk they were getting... so they'll be on guard!

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This would probably entice me to pour a shot of vodka into their beers.

Seriously I'm new at this and am following your thread to see how your brew plays out. I just finished cooking up a honey juniper 2IPA-ish beer. Started at about 1.089. My brew supply guy suggested two packs of Safale 05. I plan on leaving it in the chamber for about 20 days - I think so far out of the many mistakes I've made, rushing through fermentation has been my biggest offense.

I guess my point is, if you pitch more yeast, why not wait at least a week to take your first reading. Make the "journey" of managing temperatures become part of the fun. Or at least try to pretend it is fun. I am a total rube so I'm probably speaking out of place, but it seems like the more you mess with it to take readings, the more likely you are going to interfere with what will probably happen on its own if you let it.

Please continue with the updates - and photos. The rest of us are taking notes!


Brett

I could have been more patient, thats true... but I was pretty confident that I'd have seen some evidence of fermentation in 24 hours if indeed it was going to happen; be it airlock bubbles, or foam, or a gravity change.

I know this forum is pretty relaxed about leaving beer on the yeast for 2, 3, 4+ weeks, but not everyone shares that view. The homebrew shop I went to and the kit's manufacturer both thought that anything over 2 weeks was too long. My plan all along was to go with 3 weeks in primary as a middle ground, but I'm basically there now and I don't want to push into 4 or 5 week territory waiting for my science fair to play out.

... so I took a guess that the yeast wasn't working and moved on.

I'm getting strong bubbling now in the airlock just 3 hours after sugaring. Yeast loves sugar, it seems.

... so I took a guess that the yeast wasn't working and moved on.

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Gotcha. I follow your logic completely and can see myself trying the same experiments. If nothing else, you'll learn a thing or two. I will too - glad you are sharing the progress.

Just so you know earlier in the thread it was mentioned regarding the complex sugars.

By dumping sugar in the beer you will definitely get additional fermentation because yeast do love simple sugars and will gobble them up pretty quick but whether or not they hang around to consume any more complex sugars is doubtful.

By adding the sugar you achieved raising the ABV as well as drying out and thinning the beer so don't expect the final product to be what was expected, it probably won't be bad just not what the recipe should have been.

There are various threads in this forum regarding my first comment on some extract just sticking at 1.020+\-. It just happens sometimes, maybe due to the freshness of the extract or other unknown reasons.

You asked for beer wizards to help you and we've tried, sometimes there is no definitive answer, just conjecture.

Understood. I'm not disappointed, any homebrew is an improvement over the zero homebrew I have right now... I expect this to be drinkable even if it doesn't come out as the Red Ale I was expecting. Even if the sugar does kickstart the yeast into munching up the original fermentables I still don't expect it to come out unchanged - you surely can't just throw a pound of sugar into your beer without some effect.

For the record, still bubbling strong at the 24 hour mark.

I figure once it stops bubbling I'll start taking hydrometer readings and once they're stable I'll bottle.

Wait at least a week to take a reading, no point in wasting beer

I just sanitize my hydrometer and float it right in the bucket.

But not everyone uses a bucket.. Plus just one more thing your sticking in your beer..

Just an update for the interested... on Saturday I snuck in to take a reading because I was bored and curious. It was foamy as hell, but had nearly returned to the prior reading in the neighborhood of 1.025.

Surprisingly, it continued bubbling throughout the weekend and through Monday. Haven't checked it today but something in there is really chowing down. I only got a day worth of bubbles during the original fermentation.

What ended up happening with this? Did you get the FG down? How does it taste?

I bottled last Sunday. Tastes great.

F.G. went down to 1.020ish; so apparently the sugar did wake things up and pull it down a few points, but didn't finish things out completely.

So in short I went from O.G. of 1.041 to 1.025, then added 1.5lbs of sugar to bring me back up to 1.040, which subsequently fermented down to 1.020.

Its beer. Shrug.

Beer is good

2 weeks in bottles... reasonably well carbed, tastes GREAT!

Definitely do not regret the sugar addition, I can't taste any negatives.

So with the high fg. And the drying effect from adding sugar I could see this
Working for a red ale. I want to know a little more, not just taste great! What is it like?

I drank the whole case over ~2 months and various stages of age and refrigeration. The verdict is that it was good, but not perfect. Definitely tasted like beer, and definitely got you drunk... but it had a certain "extra" taste that was not quite welcome.

I don't have the palette to describe exactly what was amiss, but it had a sweet taste hidden in it kinda similar to the way the malt extract smelled. Almost like it was mostly beer but with a bit of unfermented ME swirled in. Everyone enjoyed it, but I was sometimes distracted by whatever that was.

No idea if it was the sugar, or the stuck fermentation, or what. I thought it was good at the time, but it can't compare to the subsequent beer I made.

After reading what happened. I would guess that the first time was not a stuck fermentation, but the sugars left over were too complex for the yeast. The only reason you "squeezed" a couple extra points out of it when you added the sugar is because you had more alcohol in it (which brought down the overall density). You would have gotten the same result if you had dumped some vodka into the beer instead of adding sugar.

But you have it right, it's beer! I'm glad it turned out decent.