No visible fermentation?

Brewed a standard brown ale 18 days ago. It's still in the primary right now since I checked the SG after 14 days it was only down to 1.026, and it's supposed to end up at 1.016. The krausen dropped after about 12 days and the airlock has been burping once every 2-3 minutes. I'm planning on leaving it in the primary, rousing daily, keeping the temps at 69-70ish, and checking the gravity in a few more days to see if it's moved.

If there are no visible signs of fermentation, can I be confident it's doing anything at all? Does beer ever continue to ferment even when there is no krausen, bubbles, or airlock activity?

Well, it sounds like it's going slowly but going! So try not to worry about it. You would be surpised sometimes how long it takes to finish up. I've have beers ferment out completely without even an airlock blurp. Either they were too fast, I had an air leak somewhere (most likely the reason), or I just missed it completely. So don't worry about that- trust your hydrometer. If the sg is going down, the beer is fermenting.

hal simmons said:

, rousing daily, ?

Click to expand...

This is an old post I notice while researching....sombody 'splain to me this "rousing daily"....sounds interesting as I could see a double edge sword so to say....keep fermenting going with yeast spread in suspension but clearing or cloudiness would be the caveat.

Any takes?

You can gently swirl with a sanitized spoon. You want to minimize any O2 exposure at this phase. It will get the yeast back into suspension so that the beer can fully attenuate. Yes it will be cloudy but it will eventually settle out. It might take a few extra days but you will have a properly attenuated beer.

My last batch was a wheat beer that fermented without me noticing. Either the bubbling stopped very fast or there was some sort of leak in the bucket lid. And there was only a very thin ring of krausen around the top of the bucket. So yeah, it can ferment very stealthily sometimes.