Is it done? Should I bottle?

[Mechphisto]

My first self made recipe is in the primary, 3 and a half weeks now.
An Irish/Milk Stout hybrid. Original gravity 1.065.

It still puts up a bubble through the airlock once every hour. Today's gravity was 1.024, yesterday's was 1.025, the day before was 1.026.

Yet Beersmith calculated the final gravity to be 1.017! (BrewersFriend calculated 1.010.)

So, it's far from the anticipated final gravity, but it's a slow crawl at 3.5 weeks now. I don't want to risk a secondary but it's coming up close to 4 weeks!

(I'd also have liked to have it bottled in time so that one might be ready in time for St. Patrick's Day, but that's unlikely.)

Any advice on what I should do?
If it's truly now still actually working at .001 per day! it'll be sitting on the trub for another week and a half at least!

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[andrewf1985]

When the gravity is stable across 3 days your beer should be done. As its lost a point per day, the yeast are still happy chomping on the sugars. You dont want to risk bottle bombs with packaging too early. Time is good for stouts anyway. You may have a lot of unfermentables in your beer so its probably pretty close

 

[RM-MN]

My first self made recipe is in the primary, 3 and a half weeks now.
An Irish/Milk Stout hybrid. Original gravity 1.065.

It still puts up a bubble through the airlock once every hour. Today's gravity was 1.024, yesterday's was 1.025, the day before was 1.026.

Yet Beersmith calculated the final gravity to be 1.017! (BrewersFriend calculated 1.010.)

So, it's far from the anticipated final gravity, but it's a slow crawl at 3.5 weeks now. I don't want to risk a secondary but it's coming up close to 4 weeks!

(I'd also have liked to have it bottled in time so that one might be ready in time for St. Patrick's Day, but that's unlikely.)

Any advice on what I should do?
If it's truly now still actually working at .001 per day! it'll be sitting on the trub for another week and a half at least!

Thanks for any feedback.

I love giving advice and occasionally even listen to it myself. You yeast are doing what they should but are being slow. Warming the beer some may help that if you are fermenting it too cool. I'd try raising it to the mid 70's and then waiting. It won't hurt that beer to sit in the fementer on the trub much longer. I've left one for 9 weeks and it turned out to be one of the better beers I've made.

You seem to know that this beer cannot possibly be ready for St. Patrick's Day. I concur with that assessment. I will predict that it will be ready by Independencel Day. It may be ready before that but I can be pretty certain of it being ready by then.

I like stouts but I've also found that they change with time and become better the longer they sit in the bottles. The best bottle I had of mine was the one that survived for 2 years and I wish I hadn't started sampling that one so soon.