How much should gravity change during lagering?

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Brewkowski

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I know the answer depends on what type of beer, OG, yeast, and other things, but I have a German Pils that's gravity was 1.018 before lagering. It's been about a month at 40 degrees or so and I just dry hopped it. I was planning on dry hopping it for a week, but I wanted to find out what a normal change in gravity would be during the lagering process. The FG should be 1.008-1.013 I believe. Should I normally expect a 5 or more point drop in secondary at this time and temp? I was going to do a gravity reading at the end of the week. If its still too high, I suppose I should bring it in out of my garage to speed things up, but that will be about a 15 degree swing. Will that be ok? I plan on bottling in the next week or so? I should have taken the reading before I threw in the hops to see the level of attenuation I guess. How do people take so many readings without losing all the brew? It's my first lagering.
 
The gravity shouldn't change at all during lagering. It's too cold for the yeast to be active.
 
Even at room temp you won't usually get much of a drop in the secondary, and at lagering temps I wouldn't expect any at all. Fermentation is not supposed to take place in the secondary, the beer should be finished in the primary before moving to secondary. At this point I doubt even raising the temperature would drop it any further, because most of the yeast was left behind in the primary and what is left has gone dormant. I think you might as well bottle at this point.
 
Yeah, I'm not sure why I thought I'd see additional fermentation at that temperature. Guess they need a Board just for those " It's probably a stupid question, but....."
I wasn't the person who did the reading, so I'm hoping my dad misread it, although he's been making wine longer for years, so I doubt it. Even with a temperature correction on the gravity it might have been a point or so off. So are what would I notice in a beer with a little higher gravity? It was in primary for like 3 weeks, but it did have some unforseen temperature variances due to winter weather. My garage was the only cool enough place and we've had some crazy temp. drops here in the past month. Could that have sent the yeast to sleep, even with the 48 hour D rest before the cold crash?
 

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