My lovely wife bought me a Coopers starter kit. I was very excited and mixed it all up immediately but I my sugar or the box of white stuff didn’t dissolve completely. For the past 5 days it’s been sitting on the bottom of my white tub. To mix or not to mix? That is the question…
It has been fermenting, my SG went from 1043 to 1020 in 4 days, plus I had a lot of foam and Krausen. Any advice is appreciated. I am very excited to start this new hobby.
Thanks
Google: John Palmer, beer
This is an online version of John Plamer’s book.
Can you go over what your process was?
Sugars will naturally go into solution. It just takes a little time. If you put a tablespoon of sugar in a cup of water and don’t mix it, it will naturally dissolve. I’m going to guess that the the white on the bottom of the fermenter is just trub or some yeast that has settled out. DO NOT STIR/SHAKE. You will risk introducing O2 into the beer with will give you a cardboard flavor. Only introduce O2 before fermentation.
I messed up on the process.
I added the malt syrup from the can. THEN hot water, and then the sugar and stirred and strirred. Whatever the “sugar” was in the box it was not regular sucrose table sugar. It had a different texture and grain. It didnt’ seem to go into solution well. Especially since I added the malt syrup first.
Then I added the rest of the water to 23L and added the yeast.
There was undissolved “sugar” on the bottom even before adding the yeast.
I’m a biochemist by trade so I’m not surprised the sugar didn’t go completely into solution considering how I made it. I’m also professionally embarrassed especially as my chemist wife watched me add the syrup then the water and sugar. I was too excited.
Sugar will eventually go into solution, but without agitation it or a stir bar it can take weeks. I’ve added 58.4g of NaCl (table salt) to a liter of water (1 molar solution) and left it over a weekend without agitation and on Monday morning the salt was still at the bottom of the bottle. If you add a stir bar or swirl the bottle the salt is completely dissolved within a minute or so.
If you have a large opening to your fermenter you could try to gently move the liquid around with a long spoon to get it to go into solution. Try to keep from splashing the liquid as much as possible.
I personally would not touch a thing. Instead, I would sit back and review the process in your head and go over the directions a couple times. Try and understand what you think you did wrong. I’m not 100% on the coopers kits, but there is a guy on youtube that brews them all the time. You may want to check out some of his videos, his station is craigtube.
I would also suggest that you get right to brewing another batch as soon as you can so you can go over your process again. I’m not a super experienced brewer like some of the other guys but these steps make sense to me.
BTW, welcome to homebrewing, it’s an awesome hobby.
