California common Q's

I'm brewing a California common, with San Francisco lager yeast and I really haven’t seen to much action in the airlock. It has been in the primary for about 5 days at about 60 degrees. Is this normal or should there be more action in the airlock?

how much airlock activity is there? has the airlock activity changed since the first couple of days? since you are fermenting at a relatively low temp, the ferment may take a week or more for the bulk of the fermentation to be complete, but this is not nessecarily a bad thing if it is slow and steady. IMHO, this produces a smoother taste.

Well, the Cali Lager is a LAGER yeast, so he is actually at a pretty warm temp (for most lager yeasts). 60 should be about right as the Cali Common is supposed to have some estery notes and whatnot. What was the OG? Did you aerate well? Did you do a starter? What is gravity now (this is the only what to really know for sure if fermentation is done)?

5 days might be plenty of time for that yeast to finish out a standard gravity beer at that temp. Take a gravity reading if if its near your expected FG, start lagering that bad boy!

Ok, on 1/12/07 the OG was 1.048 on 1/21/07 the gravity is 1.020. There is no more action in the airlock. When I took the cover off the primary there was no knausen (Foam). I'm not sure what the expected FG should be? Do you think the beer is ready for the secondary? Also my calculation give the beer a 3.6% Alcohol by volume. (OG-FG)*131=% alcohol. What can I do to increase the amount of alcohol at this point?

I am doing the same thing right now, with the 2112 yeast. Mine is coming along slowly also. I am going to leave mine in the primary for close to two weeks I think. I may not even measure it until around day 10. I was trying to keep mine at 60F/15C but let it slip a bit lower, so it slowed down a lot. 58 is the lowest recommended for this yeast.

I had some activity in the airlock on the second and third day, big burps rather than steady bubbling. But now it is down to once a minute or so. I did have a large krausen at one point though, maybe 2.5 inches, but that has subsided.

Can't we estimate the range of the final gravity from the attenuation rate of this yeast? Right now wouldn't your attenuation be 58%. I used the simple equation on the white labs page [(OG-FG)/(OG-1)] x 100. If you then assume that this yeast will at least reach 67% wouldn't that be 1.016. If it goes to 71% then it would reach ~4.5% ABV. Is this math correct, I tried to find an online calculator for this?