Frankenbrew

[Stirs]

Ok, I'm an extract brewer with less than a hundred gallons under my belt. During a rather long brew day, and after consuming a good portion of a previous brewdays earnings I decided to, you guessed it, Experiment!

It started out as a muntons imperial stout kit and at some point ended up with enough corn sugar that was originally meant to lighten it, but seemed to raise the PA % to just over 15%. These are things that I only vaguely remember. Well, It stayed in the primary for 3 weeks, and still kept bubbling. Then I racked it to a carboy for three weeks and it kept on bubbling. Then it stopped. I guess I should have expected this.......

I kegged it and aged it for 4 months now. It's just as sweet as it was four months ago. Makes a great beer batter for onion rings, but too sweet to drink.

Any suggestions? Cut it with water and try and start fermentation again? Use a different yeast and try to finish as a high gravity beer? Or dig up all my onions and make an a$$ load of onion rings?

I'm not ready to dump it. I hate to waste anything. I've learned from it already and it has a nice flavor, kinda like molasses. Might even add onion flakes and some cayenne pepper and try to reproduce the whole onion ring thing if all else fails.....

Help me out here guys....

 

[Lennie]

You're toast, go with the o-rings. Theres a couple of lessons to be learned: big beers are challenging to make, and don't get drunk before the wort is in the fermentor.

For tips on making big beers check out Fred Bonjour's web page on this.

 

[evrose]

Forget it exists for about 10-12 months. Or ship it to me and I'll store it for you. Seriously. But whatever you do DO NOT DUMP IT!

 

[sweetcell]

unless you used WLP099, your yeast crapped out by 12% max (often well before that) and thus, there is still a lot of residual (and fermentable!) sugar in there. different strains of yeast can tolerate different alcohol levels before they go to sleep, most beer yeast max out at 11-12% under ideal conditions. unless you aerated a lot and pitched a lot of yeast, among other things, your batch might not have even made it into the double digits.

after 4 months (and all that alcohol) you likely don't have any live yeast left. you will indeed need to go with a high-gravity yeast. as i see it, you have two choices:
1) you could pitch some champagne yeast. it's alcohol tolerant up to 18% i believe. this may or may not work since champagne yeast can only ferment simple sugars. there is a chance that your original batch of yeast fermenter all/most of the simple sugars already and it's mostly complex maltose that is left behind. champagne yeast can't digest maltose. so if this works out, it's the cheap way forward. if it doesn't work because most of the sugar is complex, you may well have a slight problem on your hands: champagne yeast will eat other yeast, so you might be excluding yourself from trying option #2.
2) pitch some WLP099. make a huge starter, pitch at high krausen, aerate the wort before pitching, and stand back. 099 is still a beer yeast so it's a little more flickle than a champagne yeast, there is always a chance that being thrown into 9-10% beer will shock it, but overall chances of success are higher than champagne yeast. unfortunately it's the more expensive option and takes more time/effort (re: making a big starter).

adding water to get the alcohol down might work, but you'll be diluting the flavor too. i doubt you'll end up with anything good. you need a lot of malt and other flavors to mask that much alcohol. i would not recommend going with dilution.

 

[Stirs]

Ok, Tomorrow I'll make a starter for some Red Star Pasteur Champagne yeast I have and later rack it to the 6.5 gallon carboy I use for wine. Maybe cook down some reasons for a nutrient and see how it goes. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Stirs]

Any advice on dry hopping this batch? It's rather sweet.

 

[onthekeg]

Do you have any gravity readings? Why did you transfer without checking how its finishing?
I'm not trying to be a harda$$, just curious. As said before a giant beer needs to be treated well to finish properly.
I actually think if you brewed a 5 gallon batch of a 1.040 beer, and once fermenting at high krausen, split it in 2 fermenters and top up with this one. It will ferment out and I know you won't have the giant beer, but you will have 10 gallons of something you can drink.

 

[Stirs]

Ok, it finished out at 1.059 and I mini kegged all but a bottle or two for ageing. It tasted like chocolate and coffee. Not bad flat. I put that last bit in a 5ltr I have rigged up to force carbonate and let it sit overnight. It's much better, but the head is still brown. Is that normal for a Russian stout?

 

[nukebrewer]

It finished at 1.059? That's way way too high to be a FG, even for an Imperial Stout. About the max you should be seeing for FG is 1.030 and that's at the high end. It's been over a month since this thread was started, so I don't know what condition the beer is in right now, but if you can, I would recommend trying to get that FG down to around 1.030 by adding some WLP099 like sweetcell said.

 

[Stirs]

Sorry, read my notes wrong. It was at 1.059 before I added the Red Star and FG was less than 0.99. The brown head was really where I had a question.