I have a 3-year-old Wee Heavy that has been languishing in bottles for a long time. I bulk-aged the beer for 8-9 months and apparently ALL of the yeast fell out of solution, because when I (finally) bottled it, the bottles didn't carb up.
The beer its self is massively too sweet. I boiled a...
I am looking to brew some higher-alcohol beers. I have lots of brewing toys, but no O2 (yet).
I just about to bottle a Scottish 90 or wee heavy (1.058 OG). I pitched two smack packs to try to compensate for having poor oxygenation. -by poor, I mean I just poured the wort slowly from the kettle...
I don't think I questioned his honour, just his memory and possibly his methods. -And he said all four batches were bad and all four were propagated from the original batch that I am now going to refer to "Patient zero".
I made a Wee heavy last January 2nd that I bottled last week. -the 8 months of bulk aging did it some GOOOOOOOD. I'm planning on cellaring most of the beer and tasting a bottle or two around Christmas time every year.
For big beers, make sure you oxygenate the bejeezus out of the wort and use...
I'm calling shenanigans! You said you missed your OG and added some high-gravity wort to the fermenter. I'm betting you had an infection in the first batch (possibly because of the second wort addition) and you washed the infected beasties and re-used them. I've had infected batches with those...
No-one here has mentioned Light exposure, but if your vial was exposed to lots of light as well as heat... I'd call it a day and reach for some dry yeast if you have it. Otherwise it's back to the LHBS for you. -Bummer I know ;-)
Also, using gelatin can actually knock a lot of the hops out of solution. I'd suggest dry hopping, using a tea ball full of hops in the top of the keg and skipping the gelatin. If you are one of those maniac "my beer hasta be clear or somewhere someone kills a kitten" guys, I'd suggest some...
1.088 is a pretty high Starting Gravity. (I mean it's fine for a trippel, but that's a big number). When you brew anything high-gravity like that (I'll define everything with a SG of over 1.070 as a high-gravity beer, but definitions vary) there are some special considerations to think about...
After three weeks and a stable gravity for a whole week? You're done. Extracts sometimes finish high, and this was a pretty high gravity to begin with. Call it a beer and bottle or keg that mutha.