Final Gravity Gone Wild - Mostly due to my own stupidity

[Hoppiton]

Okay, so here's my tale of woe and general home-brewing idiocy:

I recently brewed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone based on SN's brewer's recommendations. I stayed pretty close to the script, yielding an OG of 1.047 and after a week in the primary and two in the secondary it was stabilized at 1.010 and ready to bottle.

That night I pulled a stupid - I left my bottle caps at the LHBS. Thing is, I didn't realize I'd done this until AFTER I'd racked to the bottling bucket and added 3.5 oz of cane sugar for priming. But, I figured things could still be saved, so I racked the beer back onto the yeast cake in the secondary, gave it a swirl and figured I'd let the yeast take care of the excess sugar.

A week later, I transferred the beer back to the bottling bucket, once again forgetting to take an FG reading until after I'd added another 3.5 oz of cane sugar for priming. When I did pop the hydrometer in, it showed a whopping 1.022! I considered pitching more yeast but then decided to cut my losses and bottle anyway - bottle bombs be damned! Still, I never thought that amount of sugar could raise the FG from 1.010 to something like 1.022... was there a better way I could have attempted to salvage this situation?

Thanks guys!

 

[Jogurt]

I'd say that the resurrected fermentation produced CO2, that did not have time to pop out of the beer so it stuck on the hydrometer which floated higher than it should.

 

[unionrdr]

Or the yeast didn't ferment it after racking back onto it. And jogurt,I have family in Bratislava! I'm surprised to see someone from there on here this morning. Welcome home!

 

[satph]

Cane sugar adds 46 points per pound. You added 3.5oz, or 0.21875 lbs for 10 points. You need to divide this by the size of the batch in gallons. This is a normal amount of priming sugar for a 5 gallon batch, so I'll assume it's a 5 gallon batch. Then each dose of sugar would raise the gravity by 2 points. There is a problem with your readings, if 1.010 is correct, you shouldn't have read more than 1.014 after the second dose of sugar.

Looking at this priming calculator, your 2.1 vols with one dose of sugar is now 3.6 vols. If the bottles don't blow up, they'll still be overcarbonated. Once you added too much sugar you should have let it ferment out prior to bottling.

 

[wailingguitar]

I'd say that the resurrected fermentation produced CO2, that did not have time to pop out of the beer so it stuck on the hydrometer which floated higher than it should.

Not this, I'm afraid. CO2 dissolved in beer lowers the density and results in a false low reading.

 

[Hoppiton]

Do you guys think I should unbottle and pour back into the fermenter with some more yeast... or just throw it all out for that matter? At first I was gung-ho about just moving on but now can't shake the bottle-bomb fear.