Soo.. we were going to bottle today...

[adagiogray]

Well.. We thought my brew buddy's Midwest Supply Irish Stout kit was ready to bottle. We had his stout in the primary for 2 weeks, and the secondary for a week, it had only dropped from 1.024 to 1.020 over the course of a week(OG was 1.040ish). We had everything ready to bottle, sanitized.. But with that gravity reading, it put it at only about 2.9%. We took a leap of faith and tossed the boiled/cooled bottling sugar into the secondary in the hopes of a better attenuation. Hopefully we didn't jsut screw it up. Maybe we needed to just leave it alone and wait another week or 2 before going to bottle, but we figured, we'd already boiled the corn sugar up, why not give the yeasties some more sugar to chomp on to up the ABV?

Good idea, bad idea, ya think?

 

[iparks81]

Seems that the brew deffinatly isn't ready to bottle, if theres a stuck fermentation the corn sugar prob didnt hurt anything probably wont kickstart it enough to bring the gravity down to where you want it.
Corn sugar is eiser for yeast to ferment than LME\DME so it could eat the corn sugar but stop again once its all gone and theres only the Maltose left.

what type yeast did you use and what was the temps were you fermenting at?
if it was to cold the yeast could very well be dormant.
You could also try pitching more yeast to restart fermentation. Im assuming the kit came with Irish ale yeast Ive brewed an Irish ale where the yeast pooped out before my desired FG...pitched more yeast and it cured the issue.

 

[Bensiff]

If you had a 1.040 brew stall at 1.020 you might want to really look at your process as a smack pack/tube will be able to ferment that out without a starter (still a good idea to do a starter though). Did you use old yeast, pitch too warm, let fermentation temp drop? Something is goofy there.

 

[Photopilot]

I would not trust that FG to bottles. I'm thinking it should have been bellow 1.024 after 2 weeks anyways. Without knowing what type of yeast you used I would guess 1.012 or lower for final gravity. Something went wrong in primary. Pitching temps to hot, fermenting to cold?

Agitate the beer and see if you can restart fermentation. If not pitch some dry yeast in there to finish it up.

 

[adagiogray]

It was a dry yeast that came in the kit, which we rehydrated (and proofed with a small bit of extract). The first 2 days it bubbled furiously, then nada. We agitated it of course when we added the corn sugar. It's a bubbling again. As far as temp, somewhere in the 69-74 range. I brought it up from the basement to give it a couple more degrees warmth. 1.012 is about where the recipe estimates FG should be around.

Soo.... more yeast, higher temp, what do you think it needs?

 

[donjr721]

my irish stout kit seemed to do the same thing, it's still in the secondary. the og was 1.054, got to 1.020 and seemed to stop, i ended up pitching some more yeast, dropped down to 1.016 in two more days. i haven't done anything else. been in secondary for nine days now. gonna bottle in about a week to 10 days. i drank the samples i took when i got my readings, gonna be good. don't have any ideas for you here, maybe re pitch and swirl around and leave in secondary for a while. i'm just a rookie though.