High final grav

Hey everyone,

I did a parti-gyle brew a while ago and had some trouble. We got a nice 24.4 grav on the first half and it dropped to about 17.5. Needless to say its very sweet and pretty awful.

Is it possible to have cooked the mash at too high a temp to have resulted too many unfermentable sugars?

It was in the ferm for plenty of time and since I figured it was a bust, I transferred it to the second parti-gyle halfs yeast cake to see if it was stuck - no change. The yeast was said to handle up to 11%.

Thanks

What are your units there? 24.4 brix to 17.5 brix is hardly any fermentation at all. If that's correct, I'd say you mashed at WAY too high a temp and got ZERO conversion and only pulled out what sugars were in the crystal malts you used. More info is definitely needed.

Yeah that's brix. It certainly fermented a bit, but yes not much. I'm not totally sure the crystal would've got us that far along though. Also, it's not likely we cooked extremely hot. Maybe if our thermometers were off we could've been pushing 170 without realizing it.

As an added curiosity, we bottled this 3 weeks ago and not even a touch of carbonation (from priming sugar). This makes me think that somehow the yeast died. Although I dont know how this could've happened given the fact that it did ferment a little and the second (weaker) half of the parti-gyle seemed to ferment adequately.

It is possible that you mashed way too high but i would rather opt for yeasts giving up on you due to low oxygen or nutrients, you got some fermentation but your alcohol is around 7% instead of 11% so it has to be terribly sweet. Its in the bottle so at this point it will be hard to fix it they may also start to explode in few months so be careful or dump it now, you can also pour it back in to fermenter and try finish it with new fresh strain (massive starter or cake from low og beer)