Hi all,
Just checked the gravity on a wee heavy that is in it’s 17th day of primary. OG was 1.090 and I pitched a 1 liter starter of WLP028 into a 2.5 gallon batch mashed at 154F. Fermented for the first 2 days at 62F then let it rise to 65F on the 3rd day where it’s held steady. My gravity today is 1.032, but I was expecting to have an FG of around 1.023. The sample is a bit sweet. Is 17 days not enough for WLP028 or should I toss in a bit of US-05 or CBC-1 to try to bring it down? I don’t have a lot of experience with WLP028.
Essentially my recipe was based on a scaled down version of Skotrat’s Traquair House scotch ale.
In beersmith:
3 gallon batch
98.7% Golden Promise (9.5 pounds)
1.3% roasted barley (2 oz)
.7 oz Northern brewer 45 min
.7 oz Northern brewer 35 min.
1 L starter of WLP028
Yeast nutrient
whirlfloc
clarity ferm in primary
I boiled down a 1/2 gallon of first runnings to about 1-1.5 cups. then into the boil kettle.
This part may have sunk me. I went to get my airstone and it was coated in crust brown junk. Never had this happen before, I always boil it and air dry after use. That being said, I was forced to purge the headspace with Pure O2 and shake the hell out of it. I did this twice.
Fermented at 62F 2 days
then ramped up to 65F over the next 2 days.
Been 17 days so far.
Pull a sample and do a fast fermentation test. Add a ton of yeast to it and see what it ferments out to. That will let you know if you have anywhere left to go.
I’ve done this with bread yeast. Some recommend using the same yeast you are fermenting with.
If you just want to know if there’s more to go, any yeast will work. If you want to know with more accuracy where you’re likely to end up with a given yeast, it might be best to use that yeast. Or it might not. I don’t know.
I’ve had big beers take a long time to finish on occasion. You might also try rousing the yeast and heating up the beer into the 70s if you can. Especially if the FFT tells you there’s more sugars to ferment.
This is good advice and probably what I would do next before rousing and ramping up temps a bit. Pull a wine thief sample out of your fermenter and put it in a sanitized flask/mason jar along with a big pitch of yeast. Put it on a stirplate and give it 2-3 days to ferment out. If the gravity goes down you will know it is a yeast issue. If the gravity sticks, then it is a recipe/wort issue and adding more yeast or rousing it won’t make a difference.
Either way, after I pulled my sample for the FFT, I would rouse the yeast and bump up the temps to see if you can get any more activity out of the yeast.
Let us know what you decide on and how the results came out.
Sounds like a good plan. I have a 1 liter flask and a pask of US-05 that should do the trick. Do you see any need to rehydrate the US-05 for this application?
So I’ve completed the Fast Fermentation test with 600ml of wort on my stir plate with 1 pack of bread yeast and the gravity did drop a bit from 1.032 to 1.030. I had roused my yeast a bit in the fermenter but haven’t checked it yet. Would the US-05 be more likely to drop it a bit more with a re pitch or am I pretty much as close as I’m going to get. I originally mashed at 154F so I will have to consider dropping that back on future batches.
Sounds like you’re pretty much there. Maybe use some table sugar in place of base grains in the future. That should help you get better attenuation, too.
Sounds like its pretty much done. You can give it a few more days, but I bet it is ready to package up. Next time, a lower mash temp with recipe consideration can help eek out a few more points. Happened to me on more than one occasion on my first attempt at a big beer.
On this recipe I did the boil down of About a 1/2 gallon of wort. I did not figure this into my Beersmith… honestly wasn’t sure how to account for it. Could the boil down have produced a slightly higher level of unfermentables? in the end I missed my FG by about 10-12 points’. The Denny in me keeps tapping me on the shoulder saying “you really need to figure out why this beer did that”.
