Two weeks ago today I brewed my first milk stout using Wyeast 1098 yeast. The brew process went almost according to plan with one hiccup when the temperature of the wort rose to 175F when heating the grains (this was a partial grain brew). Otherwise everything was normal in making the wort. Here is the kicker though, when I took OG it read 1.031....:smack: As you can imagine I was scratching my head trying to figure out what I'd done wrong, but I still can't figure it out. I also tested the hydrometer to ensure it wasn't broken but it came clean with a reading of 1 when read in 60F water. Well I decided to just go with it and put it in the carboy to ferment and let it do what it was going to do.
So here it gets on to weird thing number 2: After fermenting for 5 days, all active fermentation came to a sudden halt. For a few days it did nothing, the krausenring had disappeared, little action in the airlock, so after trying to restart fermentation by moving the carboy to another warmer room, I took a hydrometer reading and it had only dropped to 1.028. The yeast was a few months (2-3) old when pitched, and I did have a heat belt on the carboy at a point to ensure the temperature would remain in the 68-72 degree range (note: at one point the temperature did get high, around 76, at which point I removed the heat belt and we turned the temperature in the house up and also moved the carboy). So at this point of getting the 1.028 reading, I decided something was wrong, and made a starter with the same type of yeast (but freshly purchased) and pitched it. The starter had a nice krausenring to it when pitched.
Now we get to today, two weeks after initial fermentation. Since the re-pitching there hasn't been any krausenring development and the activity in the airlock has been very slow (1x every 10-15 seconds). I decided to see what was going on in there and took a hydrometer reading which read 1.026. While there were aspects that weren't perfect about the brew process (high temperature, old yeast, repitching), I can't think what would cause the fermentation to be so slow and more importantly why the OG was so low. In addition, I'm at the point now where I feel like I need to decide if I am going to try to jump start it again, or if I bail on it and dump it? Can anyone help shed some light on what I may have done wrong to cause these issues? Or to give some advice on what I could do to save it? I've tasted it and it is super sweet at the moment, too sweet to be palatable in my opinion. Thank you!
So here it gets on to weird thing number 2: After fermenting for 5 days, all active fermentation came to a sudden halt. For a few days it did nothing, the krausenring had disappeared, little action in the airlock, so after trying to restart fermentation by moving the carboy to another warmer room, I took a hydrometer reading and it had only dropped to 1.028. The yeast was a few months (2-3) old when pitched, and I did have a heat belt on the carboy at a point to ensure the temperature would remain in the 68-72 degree range (note: at one point the temperature did get high, around 76, at which point I removed the heat belt and we turned the temperature in the house up and also moved the carboy). So at this point of getting the 1.028 reading, I decided something was wrong, and made a starter with the same type of yeast (but freshly purchased) and pitched it. The starter had a nice krausenring to it when pitched.
Now we get to today, two weeks after initial fermentation. Since the re-pitching there hasn't been any krausenring development and the activity in the airlock has been very slow (1x every 10-15 seconds). I decided to see what was going on in there and took a hydrometer reading which read 1.026. While there were aspects that weren't perfect about the brew process (high temperature, old yeast, repitching), I can't think what would cause the fermentation to be so slow and more importantly why the OG was so low. In addition, I'm at the point now where I feel like I need to decide if I am going to try to jump start it again, or if I bail on it and dump it? Can anyone help shed some light on what I may have done wrong to cause these issues? Or to give some advice on what I could do to save it? I've tasted it and it is super sweet at the moment, too sweet to be palatable in my opinion. Thank you!
