High FG, Raspberry Wheat Ale, re-pitch didn't help

Hi All,

I'm currently considering cutting my losses on my nightmare batch, so I thought I'd pick some brains before I give up on it. Several problems were encountered, and several lessons learned, but I'm hoping to save it anyway.

History;

Base recipe was a standard Heffe, 10G batch. OG was a hair over 1.04, which was below what we wanted, but not too surprising given the issues we had.

First mistake - during the brew we had not one, but two stuck sparges (lesson sucessfully learned about using rice hulls next time). Thanks to the stuck sparges, the sparge was cold (dumping mash tun back and forth twice, working outside on a cold night not helping), and long (when it threatened to stick a third time, the flow hard was extremely slow and took almost 5 hours to get enough for our 10G batch worth of runnings).

Second mistake - fermentation was way too cold. I didn't realize until after the fact, but my storage locker dropped to 12 degrees C, causing all the yeast to drop out well before fermentation had caught hold let alone finished.

Third mistake - We racked to a carboy to add the fruit, but didn't check SG. Of course we left the yeast behind in the primary, and didn't know we were still at 1.03 until after the primary was cleaned out.

OK - so here's where we tried to stop the bleeding, and start reading. We brought the carboys to a warmer spot (18-20C) and pitched a re-hydrated pack of Munich dry yeast. No dice, still 1.03 after 5 days.

We then took 2 more packs of Munich dry, got them going in about 500ml of boiled / cooled LME. Pitched at high krausen (lots of activity in our starter jar when we pitched). Airlock activity looked promising after this re-pitch, but still stuck at 1.03 after another four days...

I'm tired of throwing good money after bad, and am ready to bottle this. The samples actually taste pretty good, so I'm half ready to enjoy it even at an extremely low ABV.

Here's my questions;

Is it likely that no matter how / how much yeast we keep adding that we simply have unfermentable sugars and aren't going to get lower than 1.03?

Does the fruit afect the SG readings? Is it possible we have higher ABV than the spread between 1.04 and 1.03 suggests because of the 2 pounds of fruit we added?

It's worth noting that our next batch after this we hit OG and FG targets, so I guess I can chalk this up to a great learning experience.

Thanks for any advice.

 

Did you test your hydrometer?

 

Good point. I guess we should be testing it in distilled water to see if it hits 1.000. Haven't done that yet.

But we did hit expected OG and FG very closely on our batch that followed this, so maybe I naively assumed it was an OK hydrometer. I can look at that though.

 

Just a thought im sure its fine..unless you had real bad effic. On your mash