Wyeast 1028, big beers, and attenuation

Tomorrow, my christmas old ale will be in the fermenter for a total of 3 weeks. I used Wyeast 1028 and built a starter. The old ale had an OG of 1.085. During that time, it sat in my ferm chamber at 65F. Over this past week, I bumped the temp up to 68F, then 70F, to get it ready for today when I take it out of the chamber to have it sit inside the house for a few more weeks. I do plan to leave this in the primary until the weekend of thanksgiving, at which I'll bottle and leave it until Christmas.

Today, I took a sample and it only sit at 1.029. 64% attenuation. Now, unless it's just offgassing, there's still airlock activity going on. So I like to believe there's still some fermentation going on. I'm expecting this to hit 1.023, hopefully.

With big beers, does it take a while to hit final gravity and you can't expect to hit FG within a week or two like you can with <1.050 beers?

 

Yes... and that's the short answer.

the longer answer is it takes a while (several batches of higher gravity beers) to figure out how to get them to finish.

Me personally I've never had trouble with say 1.070 beers finishing when I make a starter for them. Usually takes them a month in the primary as a minimum, at least I don't bother checking them until then because when I've checked them before a month they are not finished yet ( ;

Anything over 1.080 I let them go for a minimum of 2 months before I bother to check gravity. At that time I decide to either A) stir the yeast sediment up and give it more time/ bump the temp up. Or plan B) just prepare champagne yeast to pitch in and give it another month. As of lately I have been leaning towards choice B) because choice A) hasn't worked ( ;

 

Ahhh right on right on. Yeah, I wasn't planning on popping the lid open until it was closer to bottling time, but curiosity got the best of me moreso because I wanted to see how the spices turned out.

Since I moved it from the ferm chamber in the garage to the living room, I think I covered the rousing of the yeast and the increase in temp. Hopefully that'll be enough. If not, neutral yeast it is!