Super High Gravity Ale HELP

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waltherjt

waltherjt

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Wow, First post after a year and a half of reading!

I'm fermenting a super high gravity ale with a target of 25%. I hit an OG of 1.223 with a combination grain and corn sugar. I zapped it with a bunch of oxygen over the first 4 days as I added corn sugar and used white labs 99 yeast. It's been steady at 1.07 for about a week now not doing anything. 2 days ago I added amylase enzyme and it didn't change it at all. It tastes great right now like a sweet liquer, but I would like to get it down to 1.04 to hit the 25% alcohol mark and dry it out a little bit. I haven't dry hopped it yet, should I?
 
What was the recipe,especially your % sugar? It sounds like you added all the fermentables up front. Generally for super high abv you would want to feed the fermentation gradually with sugar additions so as to keep the yeast moving along instead of dropping out. Check out the DFH 120 recipes for this process. At this point your only option may be to pitch another big starter at high krausen.
 
The corn sugar was 8 lbs and the grains were 13 lbs. I added the corn sugar over 4 or 5 days starting after fermentation started.

Are you saying to add a starter that is at high krausen, or add a starter while the beer is at high krausen? I was thinking of trying dry champagne yeast to see if it will clean it up a bit.
 
13 lbs grains. Assuming you got 30 points per lb) + 294 for the corn sugar = 684 points. For a 1.223 effective OG, you are brewing a 3 gallon batch.

I've never done anything near this high so I'm out of my experience, so feel free to ignore me.

1.070 is about 70% attenuation, and about 20% abv.

I don't know if there is any wine/champagne yeast that works that high.

I have heard to get to 25% with WLP099, you need to start with a couple of lower abv brews and work your way up (big cake/abv tolerance to work with ... 8% ... 12% .... 15%, etc), and slowly feed the beer with the simple sugars. It will not work to 25% if use straight as a normal yeast.

How big a starter did you use?

At 20% abv, I think you are done.

.............................................

What can you do?

1) Accept it as it is , and put it all down to experience.

2) Brew a complementary beer that you can blend with it to bring the abv down to around 15% abv. Hopefully the WLP099 will still be working.
 
That is a lot of money thrown into one batch, holy crap.

Only thing I can think of at this point myself in my VERY limited experience is freeze it. Never done this myself but from what I have read in a thread on these very boards if you...heck don't even fully understand it but basically you put it in a freezer and watch it carefully and when the ice starts to form on the top you scoop that out. From what I understand of the process is the water freezes and it concentrates your alcohol or something.

But you're already looking at what, 20 bucks a glass? :p

I agree with Calder call it done.
 
Calder said:
13 lbs grains. Assuming you got 30 points per lb) + 294 for the corn sugar = 684 points. For a 1.223 effective OG, you are brewing a 3 gallon batch.

I've never done anything near this high so I'm out of my experience, so feel free to ignore me.

1.070 is about 70% attenuation, and about 20% abv.

I don't know if there is any wine/champagne yeast that works that high.

I have heard to get to 25% with WLP099, you need to start with a couple of lower abv brews and work your way up (big cake/abv tolerance to work with ... 8% ... 12% .... 15%, etc), and slowly feed the beer with the simple sugars. It will not work to 25% if use straight as a normal yeast.

How big a starter did you use?

At 20% abv, I think you are done.

.............................................

What can you do?

1) Accept it as it is , and put it all down to experience.

2) Brew a complementary beer that you can blend with it to bring the abv down to around 15% abv. Hopefully the WLP099 will still be working.
Click to expand...

Your are correct it was a 3 gallon batch. White labs pages says it should get more than 80% attenuation. There champagne yeast says it's only tolerant up to 17%!

I did try and feed it over time, I just think in the end there were too many unfermentables. The starter was 2 liters.

I'm too afraid to ruin it if I freeze it. It seems like it would raise the alcohol, but not get rid of the residual sugars anyway, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm going to the homebrew supply and if they don't have any ideas I will just move on to aging. It's still good and has been an intersting project. It's just a little sweeter than I was thinking.

I did the math and it's $1.56 per glass. Not bad considering 1 glass is as strong as 4 "normal" beers. That's efficient drinking.
 
I brewed a similar Utopia clone (4 gallons) and have run into the same issue. Mine has stalled out at 1.090, starting from 1.200. My plan is to do a 2 gallon batch of barleywine at 1.090 and get is in full krausen and then add in the Utopia half a gallon at a time, twice a day until I incorporate all the Utopia into the barleywine. It won't be as high as I was shooting for, but I think I should be able to dry it out quite a bit, and get a drinkable brew.
 
To me it sounds like the yeast got lazy with all the simple sugars added early. The reason people do stageged sugar additions in high gravity beers is so the yeast don't just go after all the simple sugars first
 

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