Question of formulating recipe FG

I brewed up my first ever recipe that I developed. Of course, the brew day had its problems. I forgot to add the brown sugar to the boil. Would it hurt to add this to the secondary? Also I have another question about FG. How can you calculate how far the beer will ferment out to? I was thinking that mine would get to 1.010 but the guy at my LHBS said that it would probably not make it down that far.

Go ahead and add the brown sugar. I'd put it in the primary, as adding it to the secondard will create more trub there. Yeats will ferment everything that is fermentable in a wort. Attenuation for a typical homebrew runs about 70% (the other 30% are the proteins and unfermentable sugars that give the ale body, mouth feel, residual sweetness, etc.), so a 1.50 OG will end up around 1.015.

If you are doing all grain, you can change the the mashing proceedure to get more fermentables, at the price of less body, etc.

By contrast, the sugars in a cider will ferment 100% and final gravities below 0.995 are common.

Thanks David. Makes sense. I could not figure out why I missed my OG on the last brew. Then two days later I realized I forgot to add the Brown Sugar.....

Just to add to what david said....Wyeast and White Labs list the typical attenuation of each strain on their website.

Sam75 said:

Just to add to what david said....Wyeast and White Labs list the typical attenuation of each strain on their website.

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I did not know that....learn something new everyday

anthrobe said:

I did not know that....learn something new everyday

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Cool! Of course there are a lot of variables, but using those numbers will get you in the ballpark.

when you add like this to the seconday, should you be boiling the sugar in water first?

Boiling anything before adding it to the secondary is a good idea. Just let it cool off before adding & don't splash.

It should be possible tho calculate the FG from the yeast attenuation and the wort composition if you used malt extract and know it's contents of fermentable and unfermantable sugars and proteins. But this is usually not done. If one is truly interested in the FG, a force ferment test is done. This is especially true for higher gravity beers where stuck fermentations are not uncommon.

In order to make a FFT you put some pitched wort in a separate vessel and keep it warm. Once it is done fermenting you should aerate it again in order to unstuck a stuck fermentation in case this happened. If it is truly done, you can measure the FG that you can expect from the beer.

I did this for my Doppelbock and it was actually done after just 2 days. Probably because I used the vessel in which I kept the yeast before pitching and there was quite some yeast left in there. The FG I measured matched the FG I was expecting from the recipe.

Kai