High FG, please help

Hey everybody,

Please help me fix this beer, if possible. This is my first time using a secondary fermenter. With about 10lbs DME and Cooper's ale yeast, it spent a week in primary, then 2 weeks in secondary and appeared done. When I kegged it, I took a hydrometer reading of 1.044! I went ahead and added some corn sugar and the keg has built up pressure, so I know the yeast is still working. The beer still tastes sweet and sharp as if there was some cane sugar in it.

I've been brewing stouts haphazardly very sucessfully. I guess it caught up to me trying an IPA. Unfortunately, I didn't take an OG, but this is my recipe:

3 lbs Muntons Light DME
3 lbs Muntons Light hopped DME
2.5 lbs Light DME from a LHBS kit
~2 lbs Muntons Dark DME
1/2 lb corn sugar

1 oz Perle 7.7% 1 hour
1.25 oz Fuggle 4.68% 30 min
~2qt (I don't have a scale) of Cascade hops harvested from the San Juan National Forest split evenly at 7 min and 3 min

I'd appreciate any input. The warm, flat hydrometer sample was ok, so cold and carbonated, the beer will be drinkable. I'm just hoping to bump it up to 'decent'

Thanks,
guh

you took it out of primary before it was done fermenting, that was your first and most important mistake. you can plug those numbers into a brewing program to get close to your OG for your volume. only a really light grain bill will be ready to come off primary in a week. when you racked it, you removed a significant portion of the healthy yeast.

at this point, you might want to get a starter going and pitch that into the beer to kick-start fermentation to finish the job.

It sounds like you transferred way too early. Except in rare circumstances, there is really no need to use a secondary. If I assume that your original volume was 5 gal then your SG should of been around 1.099. This in its self would require a large pitching rate. If you really wanted to get it down farther you could transfer it to the primary and add a yeast starter at high krausen. However, the more you transfer the more you risk contamination. Perhaps others will have better ideas...

Racking won't stop the yeast. However, alcohol content will. It is possible that they simply can't do anymore. That was a tremendous amount of DME and this is not an IPA but more of a barleywine. It is possible the yeast are still working. Even if you pitched enough of good quality yeast with excellent aeration, it could take weeks for the beer to be finished when starting around 1.100. I'd just put the keg in an out of the way place until after the Super Bowl, then see what has happened in the meantime.

Pitching more yeast will not be effective as the number of cells you could add is already dwarfed by the amount of yeast in suspension and the new yeast will be overwhelmed by the conditions.

Thanks for your ideas. I used an online calculator and got the same OG of 1.099 for my batch of indeed 5 gal. The expected FG is 1.028, or 1.034 assuming low attenuation. I've been looking for info on the yeast and found this on Cooper's forum:

My barleywine fermentation is almost done, so far it has gone from 1.100 to 1.026 in five days. That's more or less bang-on 10% ABV.

Click to expand...

I'll try to warm up the keg to 70F for ideal conditions to keep the yeast going. Should I bleed off CO2 from the keg to keep the pressure down? Does carbonation affect hydrometer readings? I assume I'll just take samples with the tap and chill it when the hydrometer says so.