Yes I've taken the gravity and it won't change much if anything after the raspberries, but you guys are saying no action in the airlock, just leaving the berries in the beer will flavor it? They will turn white and it doesn't matter if there is fermenting or not?
Yeah man, just chill. Trust me, I've done like 5 or 6 brews with raspberries...
if you do a little bit of research, you're going to realize that the raspberries have so much more water than sugar, that the volume of water(from the raspberrie's cell walls) is added is going to negate the effects of the additional sugar, and will not affect your ABV% much, it might not at all. This is not the same for other berries/fruits, and varies a little bit depending on the variety and year. Look up the brix content. I looked into this before and if you calculate the sugar addition it's not worth scratching your ahead about...I would be more concerned about finding the correct #of fruit/gallon for flavour. Don't think about ABV with raspberries...with other fruits it might be a different story though.
They're just gonna float on top, some will float around, and some will sink...they're all gonna start losing their color until they go white, but you don't need to leave them that long. I usually rack off of the raspberries after one week and they are light pink, as if they had been bleached.
I think it's pretty important to sterilize your raspberries before racking onto them, because a lot of them float on top and are exposed to air. Seems like a high infection risk, so I always soak them for 24 hours in a campden solution.
I'd say if you had a primary fermentation, you are definitely going to ferment the sugars in the raspberries...Again, it's the flavour that counts because it's not really gonna do much for alcohol production, so who cares? I find that after 5 days on the raspberries I get the flavour I want. Ive done it longer with marginal differences in outcome.
Word of advice: tie cheesecloth or a hop bag around the tip of your siphon when you rack off the berries, or else you will have a hell of a time sucking up bits of raspberry.