Hey everyone! I’m new to home brewing and have a few questions ! I am brewing a chinook ipa and it has been fermenting for a week now and I opened it up to dry hop and it smelled a bit sour ? My temp is at 60 degrees, and just wondering if my batch is ruined or what?! Little nervous! Is that to cold or am I okay and should just wait it out? Also my airlock bubbles were really slow and basically at a stop.
Depends on the yeast, 60 should be fine for almost any ale yeast.
+1 60F should be fine.
The sour smell is most like just really young beer. All kinds of things get cleaned up in weeks 2-3 or later. That’s why everyone preaches patience.
Paul
When I brew during winter, most of my beers are around 60 by the time I bottle them. Typically it’s about 3 weeks in the fermenter and the beer always comes out fine and fully fermented.
The airlock is only going to bubble for the first day or two, that’s normal and perfectly fine.
Your primary fermenter is always going to have some really intense yeasty type smells. If you rack to secondary or racking to bottling bucket/keg and get it off most of the yeast that will go away. Conditioning time helps too, I wouldn’t worry about it.
The main advice I would give to a new brewer is trust the process. Especially if this is one of your first brews follow the recipe (or kit guidelines if it’s a kit) and just see what happens. If it says 3 weeks, give it 3 weeks, 4 weeks, give it four weeks etc. If you start making changes after one week you won’t know how it would have turned out. Maybe it would have been fine. I struggled with this early on when I thought a batch was “ruined”. Have patience. That’s hard. Once it’s all said and done, if you don’t like the way it turned out you can make tweaks, but trying to change things midstream will almost always be a disaster.
Happy Brewing!