Beer problem

Northern Brewer General
1

hello there i have a problem which i hope you guys can help me out with to decide how to fix something. i brewed a batch of coopers irish stout can kit on october 4th. what i did was make a 2 gallon pearle hop tea, then i added my fermentables such as the coopers can, a pound of dark dme, and 2 pounds of a dark treacel i made on the stove a week before, and a pound of dark brown sugar. Then rehydrated my nottingham yeast with correct water amount and temp. My temp strip on my fermenter wasnt giving a temp so i thought i killed the yeast, but the next morning it dropped to 74 degrees and started fermenting very aggressively for the next four days. At which point it has stopped ferementing. I was going to leave it in the primary for a month then bottle after a hydrometer test of course.

Well i changed my mind and was going to leave it for 2 weeks then bottle for 2 weeks. I just did a hydrometer test to see where i am and the reading was at 1.018 at 70 degrees. my starting gravity was 1.040 at about 90 degrees so the correct reading would be 1.044. At those readings im sitting at a 3.2%abv number not what i am trying to get more like 5 or 6 percent. I usually use 3 pounds of dme and 2 pounds of raw cane sugar for this coopers can kit and i usually get between 5 and 6 percent abv and never had a problem before. I still have the coopers yeast that came with the kit. My question could i add more sugar and then pitch more yeast or just dump more sugar into the fermentor and let it sit for another week. i know i need to dry hop it because the ounce of perle i boiled is faintly in the brew or its just to early to taste the hops?

I just dont know what to do and have never had this problem before with my beer. Can someone help me out thanks. i would be gratefull thx again. Cory

2

I would not add anything to the beer at this point. Just let it finish and then get a sample and see how it tastes. If the taste is go ahead and bottle/keg it.

3

i did another hydrometer reading and it said the same thing 1.018 at 72 degrees. This is the fourth week that its been in the fermentor and no changes. Do i have a stuck fermentation or what do i need to do to help fix this. The beer tasted green with some hop flavor to it. So it tasted alright but not where it should be. Am i screwed at a low gravity beer, or can i do something about this? Thanks for the help.

4

Where are you hoping it will finish?

1.040 to 1.018 is ~ 2.93% ABV
1.040 to 1.015 is ~ 3.21% ABV
1.040 to 1.010 is ~ 3.96% ABV

An issue with DME?/LME is that the wort is often less fermentable. I don’t see your beer coming down any further.

If you make a similar beer, 1lb of sugar adds 49 points/gallon. Or 9 points for 5 gallons. And will help to “dry” out the beer a little.

I would not try to “fix” this beer. Just enjoy it for what it is.

5

For what its worth my first batch Nb caribou slobber finished at ~1.020 and it was still a really good beer. If its been 4 weeks with with no change you dont have stuck fermentation, its done fermenting. Adding anything liek sugar could get you a higher abv but it would come with the risk of ruining a beer that might not be that bad. I say bottle it and enjoy, Just my 2 cents

6

i was hoping for 1.008 not 1.018. And i believe the correct reading was 1.044 because the beer was higher than 74 degrees when i took the first reading since the bottom was hot but the top read 70. Probably because the water wasnt cool enough and i didnt correctly cool the wort down. since its bottling time and i was going to use 4 ounces of sucrose as priming sugar how much would that be per bottle. I ask because i was going to throw it as a batch priming but i think i will just prime each bottle instead. Unless im not thinking straight and just boil some water and dissolve 4 ounces of cane sugar then dump in and stir.

Yes i know i should know better to re lie on a temp strip on the side of the fermentor but its never failed me before. it has on a better bottle carboy but not the other fermentor that i used.

I guess since i stopped making beer for a yr or 2 this is what i get for trying to get back into the swing of things lol. Sorry im a smartass by nature. Anyways thank you all for your help and i will know better for the future i guess one is never done learning in whatever their endeavors are.

7
http://byo.com/resources/carbonation

I think doing each bottle would be a ton of work and i’d imagine it’d be very hard to get the right amount in each bottle. Boil what ever amount of sugar you need for the carbonation you want in some water, put solution in the bottling bucket then rack your beer on top of it. Give it a gently stir at the beginning then a few times throughout bottling.

8

Since my other carboy is cracked and the only other one i have is the current one the beer is sitting in so i don’t have a bottling bucket to use since the primary is the only one with a spigot. So that’s why I was asking about the bottles. Because if I boiled water and sugar and dump it in the beer it might not get carbonated evenly since the beer isn’t being racked onto it. correct me if I’m wrong

9

You are correct. You either need to rack the beer to another pail or stir it. Obviously stirring would mix the yeast/sediment up. Not a good thing.

You have not set a location in your profile. Are you near a Home brew store that you can get a new bottling bucket? Any fellow brewers near by to loan you theirs?

You could run to Home Depo and get a couple of pails to use as a temporary storage while you clean the bottling bucket.

If you want to prime each bottle, you need an accurate scale that measures grams. Take the number of bottles you expect to fill and devide that into the amount of sugar you what to use.

Or, using a syringe, make up a sugar solution. take the volume of liquid and divide that by the number of bottles.

10

My location is uniontown pa its a 3 hr round trip to the nearest brew store not worth the gas. I was thinking about the gram thing since i have a post office scale that pretty true in readings. I usually use tgise carbonation drops from Coopers but thought i would try the normal way of priming bottle with sugar measured out. Also to try and get a certain volume of co2 which I always have winged it but never had problems with carbonation. Thanks again

11

UPDATE!!!
I didn’t add any more sugar to the batch and re pitch yeast. It he the first time I’ve ever make a beer this low in gravity before but oh well. Next time i will know better. Anyways it sat in the primary for 5 weeks and it just got bottled and will sit for another 2 weeks.

I ended up priming each bottle which cane sugar. I had a post official scale so I was good with measurements. I needed 4 ounces of sugar for the carbonation I needed. Which comes out to 113 grams, which is about 2.26 grams per bottle. I mocked a few bottles for priming and was able to get 2.1 grams with 3 tea spoons of sugar and just did every bottle the same. I did the mock measurement 4 times and got the same result so I won’t have any issues with the bottles. I ended up bottling 52 bottles, which took me 2 an half hrs because ly bottling wand tip broke and had to figure something out. But got it done it will be a good beer once done being carbonated just light in alcohol.

12

3 tsp of sugar per bottle? :shock: 1 tsp of sugar is around 6 grams.

13

HIT THE DIRT! BOTTLE BOMBS!!!

Onlineconversion.com says
Granulated sugar, 1 teaspoon [us] = 4.165 gram

http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_ ... ooking.htm

Looks like you needed about 1/2 teaspoon per bottle maybe?
I hope you made a typo in the post, if you used 3 teaspoons per bottle that is about 12.5 grams!

52 bottles about 649.74 gram = 22.919 ounce [weight] sugar

We all make mistakes sometimes, a tip though, when doing something like these conversions if you know you need 4oz sugar weigh out the 4oz of sugar. THEN use the weighed 4oz to get your teaspoons from. If an error in math you will catch it when you either run out of sugar way to fast or have a bunch left over.
If just dipping teaspoons from the bag you may not catch an error.

Also it would be best to put the sugar into all the bottles first and then start filling them. This way if an error you would not have 6 or 8 bottle filled wrong before finding it.

If my math is correct and you did use that much sugar I don’t really know what you should do now.
For sure I think I would open 1 bottle and take a gravity reading at least.

At first you thought the gravity was still a bit high at 1.018 and if you now added near 2/3lbs of sugar, oh dear!

I’d be asking what to do now if it were me, and I think myself I’d be dumping all those bottles back into a fermenter again fast to let all that extra sugar ferment out, then maybe bottle again with the 4oz.

Course that is figuring my math is correct and your posted amounts are correct for what you actually added.

Don’t feel too bad, we all make mistakes, heck we found a bucket of beer here I lost for nearly a year. Then I decided to put it into plastic kegs that use 16gram CO2 cartriges and force carb it to drink as draft, then I got the cartriges and found out the plastic kegs do not use normal 16gram cartrides!
Now I either have to prime and bottle 5gal still, or make adapters for the mini kegs to use the standard cartrige. :oops: