Should I add sugar to fermenting IIPA?

I brewed an IIPA last night and it's happily bubbling away on some harvested notty trub this morning. The specs are as follows:


85% 2-row Pale malt
10% Flaked Rye
5% Crystal 40
Mash at 151*F for 1 hour
Reached an OG of 1080

Hopping for a 3 GALLON BATCH
60 min .7oz Columbus (14.6%)
25 min 1oz Centennial (6%)
25 min 1oz Cascade (5%)
10 min 1oz Centennial (6%)
10 min 1oz Cascade (5%)
2 min 1oz Centennial (6%)
2 min 1oz Cascade (5%)

I wanted to add a ton of late hops to get a good hop flavor & aroma. I'm undecided as to whether or not I'll dryhop this one considering it's a small batch and I'm already going to lose a ton to the trub.

My real question is....should I add sugar in the fermenter to get the FG down? Brewtarget estimates it will finish out at 1020 (75% attenuation)...I'd like to to drop down to 1014 or so if doable.

I'm thinking I should wait it out and see how low the FG drops without the sugar, then add sugar if needed, but I figure giving sugar during the active fermentation might be better if someone has a definite recommendation to add it.

Either way, this beer (lovingly named "Lupulin LD") should be nice and hoppy

Ya, give it about 3 days and see where it is. If it doesn't finish out dry enough, toss the sugar in there (boil it first). I've done this exact thing.

What yeast did you use?

I scooped up a pretty decent chunk of nottingham trub from my last batch and tossed in on a stirplate in 1L of starter wort for about 5 or 6 hours to get it ready to start eating again

You already answered my second question...whether or not to boil the sugar in water first. Thanks!

If you use corn sugar, it's about 92% fermentable so you can roughly predict your FG from that. Let the beer finish out and take a gravity sample, you should get around 75% attenuation for the mash temp you used. Then, for example, if you use enough corn sugar to be an adjusted 5% of your total grain bill, take 92% of that (5*.92 = 4.6%) and add it to your original attenuation, so 75% + 4.6% = 79.6%. Add to your OG what the 5% corn sugar added (corn sugar has a gravity of 1.046/lb) and use your new theoretical attenuation to get your new theoretical FG.
When boiling the corn sugar, you can use a sugar/water ratio of 1.5lbs/cup so that you're adding as little extra water as possible.

Sugar will not get the FG down (much), but water will.

Add sugar to the water if you want to keep the same ABV (or raise it). For a 1.080 beer, about 1 3/4 pounds of sugar per gallon of water to maintain the same ABV. Less than that amount of sugar, per gallon, will lower the ABV.

Looks like the harvested trub pulled it all the way down to 1.016, or 80% Apparent Attenuation. Not bad!

The hydro sample I took tasted pretty great...I might just dryhop this after all (why not, right?). I think I might pass on the sugar but I'm still not 100% sure. 1.016 isn't QUITE as low as I wanted it, but we'll see how it turns out.


I'm also pretty psyched because I decided to parti-gyle this recipe a bit and wound up using a second sparge to get to ~1.031, then added a bit of DME to bring me up to 1040. Throw in an ounce of Centennials and I should wind up with a nice quaffer