help today with a stout

I have a mint chocolate oatmeal stout that i have been working on for about a month. The gravity has been stuck on 1026 for about almost 15 days now maybe a little longer. I was wondering if i decide to bottle this now what should i be looking out for?

Do you have a recipe, or any other information like starting gravity, that can help us make a recommendation?

recipe will be tough i kinda just winged it from a recipe that i found on here some where, i know i should have wrote it down but i didnt. Starting OG was 1088 on 2-16. then the last reading was 3-9 and it was 1026.

i found something i had posted this is a rough estimate on recipe


3.3#briess amber LME
3.3#briess gold LME
1#chocolate malt
.5#caramel120L
.5#flaked oats
4oz roasted barley
.5#lactose
.5#cocoa powder
.5#milk chocolate syrup
1oz cascade(30)
1oz paele(10)
nottingham yeast

To be honest, I would leave it a little bit longer, like a week or two more then go ahead and bottle it. I do not think that your gravity is going to drop anymore but more time in the primary will help solidify the yeast cake for when you rack off it to bottle and it will continue to clean up the beer to help with the flavor.

martn55 said:

Starting OG was 1088 on 2-16. then the last reading was 3-9 and it was 1026.


3.3#briess amber LME
3.3#briess gold LME
1#chocolate malt
.5#caramel120L
.5#flaked oats
4oz roasted barley
.5#lactose
.5#cocoa powder
.5#milk chocolate syrup
1oz cascade(30)
1oz paele(10)
nottingham yeast

Click to expand...

3.3#briess amber LME & 3.3#briess gold LME
- Search around and see how many people have fermentation stick around 1.020 using LME. It is the concession you seem to make in favor of a simpler process on brewday. It seems like too common a problem to just write off as user error. The maltster is given control of the process, so you can only work with what you are given. One strategy I have heard to counter this is to substitute a portion of the gravity you were looking to get from DME with an equal weight/% of table sugar. It is unnoticable in an appropriate quantity (8-10%?), and it will dry out a beer to a FG closer to what you expected. To be clear, maybe round off the LME additions to 3 lb ea, and substitute .6 lb of sugar. Starting gravity would have been the same and the finished beer would have been a bit dryer. I am not an extract brewer, but I also hear that you should really stick with the lightest colored extract available and color up your beer as desired with specialty grains instead of using darker extracts. It may have something to due with the fermentability of the lighter products.

.5#flaked oats
1#chocolate malt
.5#caramel120L
4oz roasted barley
.5#lactose
Lets assume you did a mini-mash, since you really are wasting your time trying to steep flaked oats. IIRC, caramel, chocolate, and roasted barley have next to no fermentability, and I know by design the Lactose is completely unfermentable. I had an Undrinkable Milk Stout (that sounds like a tough name for a beer) early in my brewing career that finished around 1.036 due a pound of lactose sugar in the recipe. Take a look at the list above; excluding the oats, you have about 2 lbs of unfermentables in a grainbill already featuring extract.

I have no experience with chocolate syrup/powder, so I can't help you there. I am sure the syrup is pretty fermentable, but I can't speak for the powder.

Long story short; you are done at 1.026. Do not waste your time adding yeast to try to restart fermentation. I'll try to nip that suggestion before it appears. There is no sugar left that the yeast can eat. As an aside, that whole "pitch more yeast" thing drives me nuts. Find me someone that seriously restarted a stuck fermentation by adding more yeast. Unless you had dead yeast to start with, accidentally cold crashed earlier than 4 days after pitching, pitched directly into 150 degree wort, or had some combination of the three, the yeast is done when it is done. After brewday, leave it in the primary for at least 3 weeks at a steady, cool temperature, rack, bottle, and drink.

The beer will be fine. Next time, substitute some table sugar for LME if you want a dry finish (you will at least get under 1.020).

Joe