stuck again?!?!

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Jay1199

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Ok so I am brewing a Black IPA starting gravity was 1.090 I probably underpitched I used wl090 And made a 500ml Starter. After I pitched the yeast the fermentation went crazy (even blew the lid of the ferment bucket). At day 10 I checked gravity it was at 1.030. Temp was a little cool about 64 so i moved it to a little warmer area its now at 68 i tried swiling it a little still nothing. I'm now at day 14 this is only my second batch so not sure where to go from here. MY target FG is 1.021.:confused
 
Was your OG inline with the calculations??? you can use various brewing software packages and enter your grain bill... my guess is that your OG was higher than it should have been.... not a bit deal.... was this a kit??? extract, all grain??? also where are you getting that the FG should be 1.021??? I had a similar issue where all of my kit brews always had a higher OG that the kit would say.... turned out that I was not topping off with water to 5g to make up for the boil off. so the OG was high due to only using around 4.5 gallons of water
 
LB OZ MALT OR FERMENTABLE PPG °L
90% 11 0 Light/Pale Malt Extract Syrup 36 5 ~
5% 0 10 Carafa III info 32 525 ~
5% 0 10 Crystal 60L 34 60 ~

This is what I used. I used Hopville to build the recipe it is basically Stone Self-rightous. I was looking for about 8.8% ABV which would put the FG at 1.021. I don't know much about attenuation but according to my caculation i'm only at 52.9%.
 
my guess is underpitched. for 5gal a one vial starter would need to be at least 3liters or 2 vials at 1.22Liters. I definitely recommend Servomyces Yeast Nutrient too with such a big beer.
 
You're assessment is correct, you drastically underpitched. For 1.09, I would have made a 2-3L stirplate starter. Did you do anything to oxygenate the wort?

Those two things go a long way to ensuring fermentation completes at or near your expected gravity.
 
Since I most likely underpitched and I'm two weeks in anything I can do or should I rack it and dry hop?
 
I shook the crap out of it. It was my first starter so i wasn't really sure what I was doing. I followed some generic directions on how to make one.
 
So do you guys think I shold go ahead a rack it to secondary to dry hop or is there anything I can do to get it going again?
 
There is really only two things you can do at this point. You can make another yeast starter then pitch the entire starter at the height of activity or you can also use a lager yeast (from a starter) then pitch that. The lager yeast will consumer sugars that the ale yeast won't touch. I haven't tried it, but I recall that being one of Jamil Zs recommendations.

Personally, I would just get another ale yeast and make a starter then pitch at the height of activity. In the future, I would recommend investing in a stir plate and calculating the proper pitch rate using an online yeast starter calculator, such as mr. malty.
 
I wouldn't hold out much hope for pitching a new starter.. you've now got a fairly high alcohol, low pH, no oxygen, hoppy environment. A 2L starter might chew it down a little, but I'd guess it's going to crap out pretty quickly because it won't be able to reproduce.
 
Pitching a new starter at high krausen was a recommendation from Jamil Z. I tried it once and it did work in my case. There is really no ideal solution for resolving stuck fermentations. Also, I would pitch a small starter because in order to pitch at high krausen, you have to pitch the entire starter. Therefore, the size should be relatively small so you don't contribute any off flavors from the starter itself.
 
You can try what SJ is saying.. he's right, it may work - I've had it fail for me in the past so it's not a sure thing. Probably better than giving up, although you could taste what you have now and see if it's any good or if there's just too much sweetness - you can usually tell if it's going to be any good at that point.
These situations suck because they're unpredictable, best to prevent them in the first place by proper pitching rates and oxygenation (obviously doesn't help you for this beer).
 
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