I transfered my Dunkel last week into a secondary at 1.023. Repitched and hoped for a better finish. Not much activity happened all week and it still sits at 1.023. Started at 1.071. Tastes good a bit on the sweet side. More so than expected for apparent reasons. Keg and drink or rack it into a primary I’m about to empty?
Since this is in the extract/partial mash category, I assume you used some extract. What type and how much?
1 pound Bavarian wheat dme, 1.3 pounds Munich dme. 1.5oz carafe 2, 1.5oz caramel rye, 2oz crystal 60, and 2oz Munich 20L steeped at 153 for 30 minutes.
That’s a 1.25 gallon batch.
Allof which means you have a fair amount of unfermentables in there. 1.023 seems reasonable.
ok. thanks for clearing that up for me.
Did you check gravity with a hydrometer or a refractometer?
Hydrometer. That’s about as fancy as I get lol
Would you care to drop some wisdom on me as to the composition of the unfermentables? And would they be broken down by an amylase enzyme? It would be much appreciated.
It’s hard to say without knowing what in the extract. But often extract will have some crystal or something else added to it.
many people and a lot of sources will list various fermentability percentages for extract. feel free to disagree with me anyone, but i find brews that are all or mostly extract, especially darker ones (which will contain crystal malt) generally will not reach the same degree of attenuation as an average (150-154F) mash of allgrain. 1.071 to 1.023 is definitely what i would expect from your recipe. if it tastes alright, then drink it
i do extract brew because it can shorten the brewday hugely, so i generally do two things:
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low gravity beer that is mostly extract for fermentables. something like 4lbs of light DME to provide fermentables and 2 to 4 lbs of grains to add flavour, ie. crystal, roasted, munich, amber etc. the lower attenuation works out fine, because the OG is simply lower, FG ending up between 1.008 to 1.015 depending on yeast and stuff
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if im making a very strong beer i will do an all grain mash of maybe 12-14lbs, which sort of starts to max out the potential of my cooler mashtun, then add 2 or 3lbs of DME and/or sucrose/dextrose/candisyrup. this is how i make beers with OGs higher than 1.075
Your SG was pretty high. Not sure what yeast you used, but it attenuated petty well given what it had to eat up. Might be too late to fire it up again.
We’d need to know your grain bill, yeast, and fermentation temp to give more feedback…
Maybe call it a bock and be happy with it
I agree with you. When I use LME I replace a bit of the extract with about .25 lb. of sugar. That usually gets the fermentability where it needs to be.
That’s some great advice there guys. Very informative. I appreciate it. I’ll make some adjustments next time I brew the recipe. Again… thank you for the responses.
I’ve also found extract to be a little less fermentable than an equivalent all-grain batch. And there are lots of forum threads about the extract 1.020 curse.