NB St. Paul Porter - Low FG/ABV?

Hello all,

I recently brewed the St. Paul Porter kit from Northern Brewer, and got a consistent final gravity reading over the past couple of days. However, the numbers seem a bit off.

I got an OG reading of 1.048 and a FG reading of 1.021. From what I can tell, that's about 3.5% ABV. The beer should've finished off around 5.5% or so, based on others' comments. Any thoughts on why this happened?

I fermented around 70-72 degrees. Visible fermentation in the airlock for a couple of days, but nothing crazy. I did not use a yeast starter for this brew.

Should I consider pitching some more yeast on it and going for a second round? Am I doing the math wrong?

Thanks for the help!

If you brewed this from an extract kit and measured the water quantity accurately, your OG is 1.052 as the kit states and your lower OG measurement was from incomplete mixing of the wort and top off water. Getting a good mix is very difficult so we tell people to go with what the kit specifies as the real OG.

How long have you let it sit in the fermenter? It could be that the yeast have ripped through the easy malt sugars and are now slowly finishing the cleanup and will bring the FG down more over the next few days. You can swirl the fermenter gently to bring more of the flocculated yeast back into suspension to speed this up a bit but it will still take some time. Adding more yeast is likely to just a waste of the yeast as you should have plenty of yeast in the fermenter already.

jer, I just bottled my NB St Paul Porter 9 days ago and took my first taste after a week of carbing for 8 days last night and let me tell you. This beer is delicious.

Anyway, I failed to take an OG on mine because when I was about to take one I broke the frickin hydrometer! But I did manage to take a FG upon bottling time and my FG read 1.20 after sitting in primary for 3 weeks. So either my beer was not done fermenting (no bottle bombs yet), incorrect reading, or I just plain and simple had poor attenuation.

How long has yours been in fermention?