Trying to ferment an 18 % beer
Submitted by brian on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 15:53.
Mehan and I recently brewed a greater than expected high gravity beer. It ended up with a potential abv of 18 percent. After one month it's up to 6 percent with 12 percent potential (highly potential) remaining. We started with a regular german hefe yeast since the beer has a lot of wheat in it, but this had no effect and was quickly overwhelmed. The fruit content is what pushed it up over into this level of ridiculousness. A high gravity yeast was then added a week or so later and got the aforementioned attenuation. It doesn't seem to be fermenting anymore according to hydro readings.
The worry now is that this beer will remain an undrinkable, albeit delicious syrup.
Thoughts? Champagne Yeast?
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I would try some US-05, it
I would try some US-05, it has done good work for me in a couple of high gravity beers. Most recently it took a 1.112 Barleywine down to 1.020 in about a week. Just rehydrate it in some boiled/chilled water, and pitch it, no need to make a starter.
Brett is also a good option, but I would give a Sacch strain a chance to get the gravity down a bit more before resorting to that.
Good luck.
There are all kinds of
There are all kinds of yeasts out there, and the dominant ester profile might already be established earlier in the fermentation. You could use champagne yeast or try the high gravity yeast again. Just make sure that you pitch an active aerobic starter with some yeast nutrient.
I also heard that krausened lager yeasts are good on stuck fermentations at warm temperatures in ales. But I am not sure that they were referring to high gravity beers. You could try a high gravity lager yeast and see what you get. With lager yeast, however, you might want to rack immediatly when/if you get to your target or you could get off flavors from autolysis.
I would do some experiments, since you are already off your anticipated course. You could use some Bret or some Wine Yeast and come up with something really interesting.
Also, age it. Big beers take longer to mature.
"People who drink light 'beer' don't like the taste of beer; they just like to pee alot."
The brett is an interesting
The brett is an interesting idea. I haven't had any luck pitching high-gravity yeast into half-fermented big beers like this. Even pitching a big starter, rousing the whole thing, pumping it full of oxygen....no effect. There was an article in BYO a while back about hitting >15% and it involved a complex set of adding more sugar, rousing the yeast, slowly working it upwards. This doesn't really help you at this juncture, but I'm not sure what would. Definitely try a small container with some brett to see if that does anything, but I've never had a real strong brett beer so no idea if it's even capable of fermenting in the conditions you've got.
Worst case, you could always try diluting it down to a 9% potential and see if you can get some yeast to pick up from there :)