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First batch jitters- no bubbles

I've made several batches of Mr. Beer (2 gal or so) , and they came out great. I advanced to a 6.5 gal. bucket and a "True Brew ingredient kit. spent a pleasent Sunday making up my first "full size" brew. Specific gravity before adding yeast was 1.042 final gravity with this kit is supposed to be 1.010-1.012 I left early monday morning and the valve was bubbling. I returned tuesday evening and everything was quiet, no more bubbles. I waited unitl today, thursday, and took a gravity reading. It was 1.018.

Questions...

a. Should I wait until this weekend, next weekend, to take another reading?

b. Add more yeast? I used the yeast pack that was in the kit.

c. Relax, everything is normal, do nothing for a week or so, have a beer,

Please say "c".

Unfortunatly I "cleaned up" before my wife came home and trashed all of the wrappers, but I remember looking at the expiration date on the yeast and it still had manyl months to go. The Mr. Beer kits gave me a finished gravity reading of 1.012. Should I assume that this is the desired reading in most cases?

Thanks Frank in NJ

Reply to
frank
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Answer: A combination of a., b., c., and d., None of the above. I'm willing to bet that your beer is all done fermenting, and there might not be much you can do to get the final gravity any lower. Let me guess: You used malt extract, didn't you? Some kinds of extracts only ferment to somewhere between 1.018 and 1.020, then stop. The rest is unfermentable sugars. Your beer will end up with a medium to heavy, sweetish body, which is not completely unpleasant unless you are trying to make a pilsner or other light beer. For me, when I use extracts (as I usually do), it is a given that my final gravity will always be somewhere around 1.018, so I simply adjust the original gravity to get to the alcohol content that I want (i.e., add extra sugar at the beginning). Unfortunately for you, if I am correct, your beer has only 3.2% alcohol by volume, which is very light and very sweet. You might try adding a sweet mead yeast or wine yeast to ferment a bit lower, although I am not certain if this would work.

Bottom line: Try waiting a week, then take another reading. If it gets down to 1.012, congratulations, I was wrong. If not, you're kind of stuck, as far as the ale goes, but you might try adding a mead or wine yeast, which might make it more wine-like.

Good luck. Let us know how it turns out.

-- Dave "Just a drink, a little drink, and I'll be feeling GOOooOOooOOooD!" -- Genesis, 1973-ish

Reply to
David M. Taylor

Just thought of one more thing you could try..... BEANO. You know, those little pills you take to eradicate gas in your digestive system? Well, it works in beer, too. I've heard from a couple of different sources in BYO magazine that you can add somewhere between 1/2 a tablet to 4 tablets for a

5 gallon batch to effectively cut your final gravity in half (I guess they aren't exactly sure how many tablets you need). So you may be able to convert some of your unfermentable sugars to fermentables and end up in the FG range you wanted. My suggestion would be to crush 3 or 4 tablets of Beano, add it to your brew, and let it sit for another week and see what happens. While I have never tried this myself, it has been scientifically proven to work. Reference BYO magazine, July-August 2003.

Good luck.

-- Dave "Just a drink, a little drink, and I'll be feeling GOOooOOooOOooD!" -- Genesis, 1973-ish

Reply to
David M. Taylor

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