FG and secondary questions.

[ClarkBar]

I brewed a 10 gallon full boil stout using extract. OG was 1.066, I split it into 2 carboys, one using 1098 yeast, the other 1084. I used 2 smack packs per carboy (don't do yeast starters yet). One month later, after no airlock activity for a long time, I moved to secondary (2 carboys again), and added cacao nibs. Gravity reading at this point was 1.024 on the 1098 yeast and 1.022 on the 1084 yeast. I thought the gravity reading should be lower... The 1098 took off bubbling away after about 4 hours and the 1084 after 48 hours is standing still.

The temperature of my fermentation chamber is 65 degrees.

My question is this. Is my FG before moving to secondary too high? Why is one yeast strain bubbling away and the other doing nothing? I was not expecting any airlock activity at this point. Taste tests on both tasted good, no infection that I could detect.

I know at this point I should just let it go, I'm just curious why one seems to have kicked off another fermentation and the other nothing.

 

[bobeer]

Typically you'd want to take at least 2 gravity readings of each beer before you move it to a secondary or bottle/keg it. If you get 2 of the same readings then you know it's finished.

With my experience with extract beers the FG usually stops at around 1.020+- no matter what yeast I used. I used to dry out certain beers with honey or sugar to get it a little lower.

I'm sure you're ok. What is would do is probably check the gravity again and see if it's the same as before. If it is and you're done aging on the coco nibs then bottle/keg it.