Evan!
Well-Known Member
I get stuck fermentations here and there. It's just in the course of business. Not often, but once in a good while. Doesn't matter how big the starter is, how much I oxygenate the wort, sometimes the yeast will just poop out a little too high. Dumping dry yeast on it never helps. Even making a starter from a liquid culture and dumping it at high krausen has never worked for me.
So couple months back I ended up with a Saison that finished at 1.017...way too high. I tried raising the temp, rousing the cake, nothing. Just by happenstance, I had a Forbidden Fruit cake from a witbier sitting there waiting to be washed and harvested, so I dumped the Saison on that cake. Bam, a couple days later I was at 1.010!
So last weekend I brewed a Southern English Brown with a nice healthy starter of WLP002. It pooped out around 1.020 3 days later. Well, I thought, now's a good time to test out my hypothesis. So I had a batch of a very simple ale that I fermented with S-05 and it was highly attenuative (will one day be a kriek) that was ready to be racked. Last night, I racked it off the cake and racked the SEBA onto it. As expected, this morning, there's a nice little mini-krausen and some airlock activity.
So there's my PSA. You got a stuck fermentation? Just wait until you have a healthy cake (meaning, that beer attenuated fully with it), and dump the stuck beer right on top of it. I'm batting 1.000 so far...and I'll keep updating this thread if I have any future experiences with the technique.
EDIT: I'm not taking credit for this technique, it's nothing new, I just wanted to start a PSA thread for everyone to see. Credit for giving me the idea in the first place goes to ColoradoXJ13!
So couple months back I ended up with a Saison that finished at 1.017...way too high. I tried raising the temp, rousing the cake, nothing. Just by happenstance, I had a Forbidden Fruit cake from a witbier sitting there waiting to be washed and harvested, so I dumped the Saison on that cake. Bam, a couple days later I was at 1.010!
So last weekend I brewed a Southern English Brown with a nice healthy starter of WLP002. It pooped out around 1.020 3 days later. Well, I thought, now's a good time to test out my hypothesis. So I had a batch of a very simple ale that I fermented with S-05 and it was highly attenuative (will one day be a kriek) that was ready to be racked. Last night, I racked it off the cake and racked the SEBA onto it. As expected, this morning, there's a nice little mini-krausen and some airlock activity.
So there's my PSA. You got a stuck fermentation? Just wait until you have a healthy cake (meaning, that beer attenuated fully with it), and dump the stuck beer right on top of it. I'm batting 1.000 so far...and I'll keep updating this thread if I have any future experiences with the technique.
EDIT: I'm not taking credit for this technique, it's nothing new, I just wanted to start a PSA thread for everyone to see. Credit for giving me the idea in the first place goes to ColoradoXJ13!