I just realized I forgot to add the yeast nutrient 3 weeks ago. Is there something I can do with it? Make another starter and use it there?
The yeast tolerance is something like 9-9.5% and it’s suppose to hit around 12%.
Yeast alcohol tolerance is a fuzzy and inexact thing. I’d let it ride.
And three weeks is pretty far along in any event. You will likely be fine. Cheers!
Wouldn’t that much residual sugar be sweet?
Checked the gravity and found it at 1.042. It is supposed to hit about 1.021.
Would this even bottle carb??? Seems unlikely. Regardless I’m not happy with this. Is there any reason not to make a small starter and add yeast nutrient to that?
*EDIT *
A bit of background. I’ve been keeping US-05 going as I found it to give slightly higher attenuation and flocculation. I make a 1.5 qt starter using 6 oz of DME and save the pint using a quart. For this beer I doubled it since the OG was so high.
I would actually make a big starter to finish it up. That is your best shot to bring FG down. 3 weeks is way too long fermentation.
what was the OG?
Not necessarily
Until you do a FFT you have no idea if it will help.
Just to be sure on this - you are measuring the current gravity with a hydrometer? A refractometer would not give you an accurate current gravity without adjustment.
Why would 3 weeks of fermentation be too long? Seems initially I had read that fermentation is typically done within a week or so, but that allowing it to warm to room temp and sit that the yeast will “clean up” after themselves eating some of what they produced.
I’ve never done shorter than 2 weeks with 3 being typical. I figured I’d let this go for 5-6 weeks being such a high gravity.
It was targeted to be 1.113 but hit 1.109.
FFT??? Sorry, I’m clueless as to what this stands for.
I use a hydrometer for everything. I don’t own a refractometer.
Forced ferment test. You take a little, add a massive amount of yeast to ti (even bread yeast) and leave it at room temp. The purpose is to see if the wort is fermentable. If the gravity goes down after doing that, then additional yeast in the batch might help. If it doesn’t got down, them you have a wort issue and more yeast won’t help.
Thanks for explaining that.
Why would there be a wort issue?
Could be a lot of unfermentables in the wort. You don’t know til you do the test.
What harm might there be to forgoing the test and adding a starter with nutrient or using a higher gravity yeast?
At this point, if it doesn’t taste right or has too much body to be drinakable (cloying, for example), you may be able to get it down further with a more attenuative and alcohol tolerant yeast, but the FFT will tell you without submitting the whole batch to the experiment and ending up with a yeast soup of a beer. Or you can try your approach and, if it is unsuccessful then resort to use of another source of metabolizing the “unfermentables” (such as a Brett strain or diastaticus Sach C type), if there are starches or long chain dextrins in there preventing the further drop in gravity points.
FFT is usually done at an elevated temperature and on a stir plate. But of course Denny’s misplaced his stir plate. If you want details on the fancy way, Chris & Jamil’s Yeast book has it. Denny’s simplified version sounds much less daunting and I can’t see why it wouldn’t give you the info you need. Now that he’s brought the obvious to my attention, I may be more inclined to do an FFT when there’s any question as to attenuation limit. I agree that I’d rather play it safe and try to suss this out on a small sample before messing with (messing up?) the whole batch, making a starter, etc.